The blurb on the back cover of Rory
Waterman’s second full collection, Sarajevo
Roses (Carcanet Press, 2017), talks of a poet “on the move”. Rather than on
the move, however, he seems “in transit”.
First off, there are the obvious
physical moments of travel, of the contrast and comparison of places.
Nevertheless, these moments are restless instead of fulfilling. The poems in Sarajevo Roses wrestle with the search
for truths in elsewheres, yet they often reflect the unease of filling time
with travel. With each trip, each new place, an implicit tension develops
within the underlying emotional dynamic of the travellers, as in the following
examples:
“..you joked and moved, I thought,
closer to me
as another couple stepped out, their
business done…”
(from “The Brides of Castell de
Belver”)
“…My hand
knocks yours, takes it…”
(from “Getaway”)
The use of “I thought” in the first
extract is pivotal. It qualifies and undercuts the relationship between the
travellers, ramping up the above-mentioned tension.
And then there are other forms of transit,
as in “Sots Hole”. A place is revisited and the protagonist has changed:
“…Twenty-five years later, and he
goes back
with her to that bank, leads her
down that metalled cycle track
and takes her on a bench-rail, hid
in a hide.
The latch would open to a world
still simplified,
where willows comb water and unseen
mallards meander.
And she pulls him close – all he
once thought he wanted.”
This passage not only highlights
Waterman’s metrical strengths and control of sentence structure and length, but
it shows him yoking them to a lack of certainty, to the loss of physical and
emotional anchors, to a world no longer simplified, to the layered portrayal of
a poet in transit.
Some would argue that perhaps the
most powerful reflection of the fragility and transitory nature of human
relationships is not the line from life to death but the cyclical shift of
generations. Waterman is only too aware of this (yet another form of transit),
and several of Sarajevo Roses’ most
powerful moments revolve around it. One such instance occurs in “Family”, where
doubts over potential parenthood send the speaker back to their own parents:
“…and I set to, scrawling postcards
to my parents:
an only child must remember more.
Each while, my mother hopes for
news.
Each while, my father, elsewhere,
hopes for news.
Will none of us say the things we’ve
thought
until there isn’t time? I’ll harden
my thought.
We are too many. We haven’t seen
enough.”
There’s a hint of Larkin’s “The
Mower” here, but with the personal Waterman imprint of an impatient,
foreshortening thrust towards the poem’s core via the statement “I’ll harden my
thought”.
“Family” reflects uncertainty and
the fragile, shifting sands of a couple’s relationship, but its significance grows
further in the light of the poem that follows it, “34, Above Cwmystyth”, which
ends as follows:
“…But only us up there,
alone and quiet,
together and separate
until I snagged her gaze.
“Do you ever want children?”
And was it being in this
over-fertile ridiculous cwm
made me ask it?
And neither quite said no –
watched suddenly
by the person
we won’t make happen.”
There are two fundamental tensions
running through this extract: semantic in terms of “together and separate” and
grammatical in terms of the implicit jolt and jar between juxtaposed uses of
the past and future tenses in the final stanza.
Sarajevo
Roses is a collection by a poet who’s in transit. That
doesn’t mean it should be seen as a stepping stone or an insignificant volume
in itself. In fact, quite the reverse is true, thanks to Waterman’s honesty and
self-awareness. His collection provides the reader with fascinating insights
into how we move through life, all harnessed to the formal control that’s
exercised one of the outstanding versifiers of this generation. It’s one of the
best books I’ve read in 2017.
