"Sarajevo Roses" by Rory Waterman (Carcanet, 2017)

Poems from many of the best magazines - PN review, Poetry Review, Poetry, TLS, etc.

I had to look up the title. According to Wikipedia, "A Sarajevo Rose is a type of memorial in Sarajevo made from concrete scar caused by a mortar shell's explosion that was later filled with red resin." That fits in with the efforts to highlight the past in this book.

I have a basic problem though - I can't always work out what the poet's trying to do. Here for example is the start of "The Avenue" - They found a man in the shrub that shields our lane - / one fat white hand not tucked in the pit -/ and cordoned off a patch. We had nothing to explain it// but The Post. First, there's a problem of line-breaks. Only the stanza-break does much. True, there's end-rhyme - the poem's pattern is abb cdc eeb which has a kind of symmetry. The syllable count of the first 3 lines is 11/9/14, which doesn't help. Why a single "shrub" rather than "shrubbery"? Perhaps it's a common usage. What does "not tucked in the pit" mean? If the only explanation was in The Post, that's how one would normally phrase it. The phrasing of the poem makes it look as if The Post is the explanation/cause of it. The stanza break encourages double readings. But why?

His use of rhyme is rathyer alien to me. "It was" has lines ranging from 6 to 18 syllables, but the end-rhyme scheme is strict - aabbcaac. "Reunion" has 4 xaxa then a final stanza which only has assonance.

There's more trouble for me at the end of "June morning, Erewash Canal" - "May petals file across in fuddles of sun-dried snow". Why "in" rather than "like"? Are the petals in something that looks like snow, or do the petals look like snow? I presume that these are old (maybe month-old) petals ("May" being the month rather than an indication of hope), but are they really in lines/files? In an urban dictionary online it says that "Fuddle" is a word "used mostly in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, that means to sit comfortably and eat a variety of chocolates and sweets. Or cuddle up under lots of duvets and eat a variety of comforting sweets and chocolates". Or more generally it can mean "a confused state". Whatever, I still can't parse the phrase.

"Bleached Stars" begins with "From each fat coin spindles rooted and tugged at the shore wind" and ends with "And writhing from nub torsos across the sand spingles root and tug at the shore wind". I was hoping that I'd understand the phrase by the end. I think I must be missing something in "Sleeper" and "The Heritage Centre" too.

I'm more at home with poems like "Family" where a childless couple sees a toddler causing a scene. Then "I think What could our life be with someone else in it? then You would be our life". Then "I set to, scrawling postcards to my parents: an only child must remember more". The parents are waiting for news ...

In "Between Villages" the narrator sees "furrows full of seed and cobbles ending by the village where we grew up" (I guess this is something to do with seeing the past as seeds, some of which fell on stony ground). Then "Slung above, the Plough's slack cord of lights is tiny in all this blackening blue". I presume the Plough's a constellation and not a pub. Then a man emerges from a cottage who "stamps off along the bridle path: he's a torchlight light jinking. We nod in passing.". They acknowledge a similar predicament, though they use light in different ways.

There's more on how a glimpse of the past affects the evaluation of the present in "Sot's Hole" where the narrator plus "her" revisit after 25 years a place where "she pulls him close - all he once thought he wanted".

Countryside imagery abounds - "the great aviary of a Welsh valley whirred and chirruped its fragmented continuum" (p.16) "Over the fields a stub of moon smudges the scudding cloud" (p.50). In "Brexit day on the Balmoral estate" it takes on a more symbolic tone - "sponge-and-matchstick trees", "a meadow pipit chats and teleports twig to twig to twig to", "squabbling geese materialise as dots ... not needing to process why they do", "two deer ... do not know there is no stalking today. They do not know there was stalking yesterday.". "Spurn" has cows who "each in turn turns off, like lights at night: when there's nothing to fear why unite, why stay alert?"

"St Thomas's" might be excellent - it's a bit beyond me. I didn't like the concluding poem, "Tuesday".

Other reviews

Peter Pegnall (Rory Waterman’s work is wonderfully intelligible; by that I do not mean facile or prosaic, but that his vision is clear, his language scrupulously chosen, his quest for meaning apparent and authentic. ... it tends towards meditation rather than excitement, perhaps, but it is very rarely without substance or craft. A poem or two may depend too strongly on an evocation to speak for itself and I am not hugely amused by the final piece, “Tuesday,” ... I’d like to consider closely a two stanza tour de force, “Love in a Life.” )
• Vicki Husband (Waterman often returns to a moment in the past, an unmarked crossroad where something almost went unnoticed until, revisited, it takes on its full significance.)
• William Bedford (Waterman has a flawless gift for the telling detail)