The boatman stares through million-pock-marked waters,

tapping a cigarette, shying from the rain

in mac and wellies, beneath a London plane

that rustles and drips. He turns and tells his daughter

to bolt the hut. Tonight the summer’s over.

He heaves the skiff to the boatshed, ties the lines

and double-locks the door. She fits a sign:

CLOSED FOR SEESON. They load a battered Land Rover

with cash tin, radio, stools, as fast as they can,

for it’s raining harder. Lightning blanks the dark,

and then they’re away, the wiper thwacking its arc.

She glances at this ordinary man

then shuts her eyes: she’s damp and tired and bored.

He drives more gently. Neither says a word.

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.’

Rory Waterman writes poems of the kind there’ll always be a need for – poems that require skill to make but don’t insist on it, that combine keen-eyed observation and immediately graspable shades of feeling in a memorable way. Waterman’s is a very appealing voice, laconic, unillusioned and vulnerable. His world is a recognisable and convincing one, his rueful, sometimes harsh sincerity is palpable, and he deserves to be read by anyone to whom these things still matter.
Alan Jenkins

Navigating

Family Business 

Visiting Grandpa 

Retrospect 

What Passing Bells 

Rebirth Island 

In the Avenue of Limes 

An Email from Your Mother 

Two 

Growing Pains

  1. Distance 

  2. For My Father 

  3. Ireland, 10 

Access Visit 

Seeing Him Off at the Station

Craigmillar Castle at Dusk 

Faroe Islands: Notes for Three Photographs

Nettles

Reverdie

Seeing Baby Emrys in Gwynedd

Salisbury, After the Argument

For R.S. Thomas

Coming Home

From a Birmingham Council Flat

Broadland

Where Were You When...

The Outings

A Suicide

West Summerdale Ave

53° 09'33.17" N, 0° 25'33.18" W

To Help the Birds through Winter

The Lake

Shrine for a Young Soldier, Castle Drogo

On Derry City Walls, 1992

Unfolding

Marstrand

Winter Morning, Connecticut 

A Wedding Photograph 

Back in the Village 

Compulsions 

The Fields over Winceby Battlefield 

Spring Shower, Metheringham Fen 

The Beck 

Keepsakes 

‘You’re a shower of bastards’ 

Note to Self: Chip Shop Battered Sausage and Other Meat 

Stopping for a Moment on Exmoor 

Back 

Infant 

Stranger 

Sendai 

Fall 

Hallowed Turf 

The Shipwreck Memorial a Mile from Town 

Over the Heath 

Out to the Fen