Isabelle Thompson reviews Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman (Carcanet, 2024)
Rory Waterman’s fourth collection is, at first read, a hugely diverse and even disparate collection consisting of three seemingly separate sections. The first, the blurb tells us, is about the final year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman. The second consists of more political pieces about borders, boundaries, and belonging, and the third modernises four traditional Lincolnshire folk tales. However, after sitting with these poems for some time, it becomes clear that while they remain wide-ranging in their scope, form and subject matter, they are nevertheless united by the ways in which nearly all blur the boundaries of time or place. As the critic and poet Declan Ryan said at Waterman’s online launch last month, “the poems time travel.”
The standalone poem that opens the collection, ‘Ainns World of Miniature Marvels’, and the final poem in the book, ‘Envoi’, are worth exploring in detail since both demonstrate how Waterman flaunts rules of time and place. The first begins in South Korea, where the speaker tells us he “wanted to make the short trip up Wonmisan / and rake my eyes across a miniature Seoul”. However, the weather forecast has prevented him from making the trek and sent him instead to a museum of miniature model landmarks. Here, he finds “tired and tiny landmarks” such as Downing Street. Reminded of home, the speaker imagines how it would be to call his now deceased father and ask him if he remembers a hike they took up Mount Brandon when he was a boy, where:
[…] on the summit, I showed you our bay,
sweeping a finger along the shrunken shore
to our pro tem home, too small for you to find.
In this startling poem Waterman points to ways in which we carry the landmarks of our past with us. No matter how far we travel or how much we age, he tells us, there will be places and experiences that live on and come back to us at surprising moments. In ‘Envoi’, he sees the “ghost” of his mother aged around twenty. In the final few lines he asserts “there’s no / time but the present”, but his present is heavily infused with the past; they are inextricably linked.
These are poems which deal with the decline of a father with alcoholic dementia; time and place lose their edges in a way which mirrors the father’s shrinking grasp on the moment
The first section of the book opens with two quotations that set the scene. The first, by Ken Kesey, reads: “Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense.” Subsequent poems deal with the decline of a father with alcoholic dementia; time and place lose their edges in a way that mirrors the father’s shrinking grasp on the moment. Moving pieces describing the realities of his father’s illness are interspersed with ‘interludes’ depicting memories of the speaker’s childhood.
‘Reverdie’, for example, takes its title from an old French poetic genre celebrating the arrival of spring, meaning ‘re-greening’. It begins with a passage written by the poet’s father about a visit to his son in the “Social Services / visiting room”, following the break-up of the parents’ marriage (“Where had Daddy miraculously reappeared from? One could see him trying to figure it out.” – Andrew Waterman’s ‘Rory Journal’). It goes on to compare this visit to the another, in which the adult poet visits his father in a care home. In the initial visit:
[…] being two,
I was the one thing you’d looked forward to
since last time, though I’d needed to relearn you
were Daddy.
Waterman seems to suggest that his relationship with his father is undergoing a kind of re-greening, and as spring returns (“Snowdrops. Ramsons.”) so does the father’s child-like joy in his son’s presence. Thus the poem offers a moment of semi-solace. But it is only semi-solace, because it is clear that his father’s memory is faltering, and even though he is “excited”, he “can never understand / how I am suddenly here.”
Come Here to This Gate, the title of both the collection as a whole and its middle section, takes its name from the famous speech given by President Reagan calling for the fall of the Berlin Wall, and hints at the idea of gateways opening between different places, or between past and present. A number of these pieces were written during Waterman’s time as international writer-in-residence for Bucheon UNESCO City of Literature in South Korea, where he was commissioned to write about the border, and, as Declan Ryan noted at the online book launch, the poems are global in their scope. The title poem contains the refrain “across the border” and many instances of this phrase are split across stanzas, driving home a sense of separation. It describes stories of cross-border survival and defiance in, for example, East Berlin, Mexico, Ireland and Korea. Waterman finds ways to bring these places together, regardless of geography or the passage of time, and in doing so he shows that both oppression and resistance can be universal and ongoing.
Waterman finds ways to bring these places together, regardless of geography or the passage of time, and in doing so he shows that both oppression and resistance can be universal and ongoing
‘The Burr’ describes a walk with the speaker’s mother during lockdown. On this walk, the pair discuss Zimbabwe, the home country of the poet Togara Muzanenhamo, with whom Waterman co-wrote a version of this poem. When the mother asks “Zimbabwe! What’s it like there?”, the son understands she’s referring to the situation with regard to Covid-19. “Parts / are now on the usual curve”, he tells her.They go on to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement. The poem explores the strange ways in which Covid at once united our experience and revealed chasms of inequality.
Another piece in this section, ‘The Stepfathers’, again demonstrates Waterman’s concerns with the re-emergence of difficult childhood memories in adulthood. A stepfather’s abuse of his stepdaughters is revealed when:
[…] her sister
stopped by, unexpected, decades later,
said ‘I have something serious to ask…’
We’re told this man is “only kept alive on mother’s wall”. He’s dead, but something of him still lasts into the present.
Described by the author as the “pudding” of his collection, ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales’ contains the most light-hearted and humorous work in the book, although even here we can see time, in particular, becoming flexible and fluid. ‘Yallery Brown’ updates an ancient folk tale for a modern setting. In the new version, the curse that the mischievous spirit casts on the farm labourer condemns him to a life of “watch[ing] Jeremy Kyle / on repeat”. Such poems are rooted in place and yet have a wider reach – as Waterman says, these folk tales are “specific” to Lincolnshire while tapping “into something much more widespread”.
All of life is here – the heartache and the humour – bound together by an understanding of the essential fluidity of time and place. We carry our histories with us, Waterman tells us. The people and places from past experience are central to who we are now.
Isabelle Thompson holds an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. She has been published or has work forthcoming in a range of magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Stand and The New Welsh Review. She was the winner of the 2022 Poets and Players Competition and a runner up in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition. She tweets @IzzyWithTheCats.
