The poems in Rory Waterman’s debut collection Tonight the Summer’s Over explore belonging and estrangement with precise resonance. Born in Belfast and brought up in rural Lincolnshire, Waterman turns an unblurred eye on his own childhood, caught between two countries, two cultures, two parents. Yet his poems are never mere autobiography: they are rooted in a broader concern for the inconsistencies of human experience. Tonight the Summer’s Over becomes a book of love and hope: ’Lift the purest feather from the wreck. / Ignore the seagulls laughing against the sky.’
Om författaren
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast and grew up mostly in rural Lincolnshire. He has written two books on twentieth-century poetry and is a critic for various publications, and his poems have appeared in the TLS, New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011), Poetry Review, New Statesman, Guardian, Financial Times, PN Review and elsewhere. He teaches English at Nottingham Trent University. Tonight the Summer’s Over, his first collection, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. He also co-edits New Walk poetry and arts magazine.