Enter the Water tempts you to wade straight in. And it will take only the briefest of dips, a toe in the water, before you find yourself needing to read on. Whether or not this is poetry (and possibly it isn’t) swiftly becomes a non-issue, because Jack Wiltshire, who grew up in Leicester and recently graduated from Cambridge, occupies his own element. He is a Pied Piper of a writer (though I am not sure if the Pied Piper ever swam). His writing is fresh, funny and serious. His verse narrative, set in 2022, describes becoming homeless in Cambridge and journeying to the coast in the company of pigeons, a blackbird and the unruly Storm Eunice. Swimming, he finds, is a form of salvation. The book is an experiment, a work-in-progress, but not in the sense of requiring further effort; more because Wiltshire recognises life as an ongoing, scattered experiment, filled with imperfections, inequality and with endless room for improvement. He opens with an admission about Nature (one of the rare nouns granted a capital letter) as his unreliable yet necessary pal:
he’s not always a nice guy, Nature
but he tells me he’s all i’ve got
