Sarajevo Roses
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:28th Sep '17
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* His previous collection was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. * Rory is a well-known figure in poetry, regularly writing for PN Review and the TLS, and he lectures in English at Nottingham Trent University. * This collection is more international in focus, though not entirely eschewing the personal intimacy of his previous poetry. * Includes themes of class, faith and doubt, contemporary English society and European, cultural and national identity. * Contains more formal and experimental forms of poetry than his first collection.
Beautifully formal and engaged, this book celebrates individual, collective and European identity. From Brexit to the election-enthralled US of 2016, this collection is highly relevant and international in scope.Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections
Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move. On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma’s Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where ‘selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar’. Sarajevo’s ‘neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete’ is twinned with the ‘church spires and rain-bright roofs’ of the poet’s former hometown, Lincoln.
The Sarajevo rose of the book’s title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.
'In this book, personal, emotional wounds are memorialised... the poems are the red roses that these moments become, marking a distance between selves, acknowledging them as landmarks in a psychological landscape.'
Vicki Husband, The Compass
'The world is a slightly better place for the existence of this book. I do not write that lightly.'
Peter Pegnall, Ploughshares
'The collection is marked by a sense that the world is indifferent to us, both as species and individuals, that time is slippery and fast-moving...For all his often regular metrics and traditional craft, these are not conservative poems... It's a consistently 'political' book.'
Declan Ryan, Poetry London
'Waterman is a fine craftsman and this is a thing most needful in the collection's journeyings through 'industrial dereliction' and the painful re-calibrations of a 'post empire' experience. Re-imaginings of spaces for leisure are met by a poet who is at home with formal variations, rhyme and meter.'
Peter Carpenter, Under the Radar
'Waterman's work extends out and beyond any dangerously neat equations or notions of 'home' and 'self'; with him, it is in the settings of Europe's past and future. The reader visits Iceland, Palma's Bellver Castle, Venice, Kruj,, the Italian ghost-town Craco, St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and in all the travellings we become more and more aware of the precarious fragility of human 'settlements' in all senses.'
Peter Carpenter, Under The Radar
'a volume that balances both wit and wisdom'
Kate Noakes, the North
'Very few poets can bring to the lives of others the same devout attention we tend to bestow upon ourselves: Rory Waterman is just such a poet. Whether their site of meditation is an abandoned colliery or a much-marketed urban vista, the exquisite lyrics of Sarajevo Roses are imbued with mindfulness. Suppleness of poetic line matches suppleness of spirit.'
Judges, Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collection
- Short-listed for Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2019
ISBN: 9781784104085
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 7mm
Weight: unknown
64 pages