Monday 18 December 2017

Poet in transit, Rory Waterman's Sarajevo Roses

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.

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