Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman (Carcanet, £11.99)
Waterman’s fourth collection opens with a series of elegies. “The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches”, he writes as alcoholic dementia takes hold of his father and language deserts him. Rueful, tender and utterly scarifying, these are among the very best father elegies since Michael Hofmann’s Acrimony. A central section addresses the upheavals of midlife: invited by a social media site to revisit his memories, he decides he would rather not (“No. Click the little X again. / Forget that we were ever there”). With his carefully weighed retrospection, Waterman is the most Hardyesque of modern poets, forever sniffing out the might-have-beens beneath mere actuality. Never merely solemn, Come Here to This Gate is a wise and deeply satisfying book.
Are You There by Samantha Fain (Bad Betty, £10.99)
Readers may recognise the title from the Netflix “idle” screen. Its combination of technology and vague distress is in keeping with the explorations of the self on show in this wittily knowing work. “In poems, we echolocate / the feelings”, Fain writes, thinking of whales and feeling her way uncertainly into the space where “a poem exists / as several selves”. Fain coins the neologism “delinger” for her attempts to overcome inertia, but the bracketing of authenticity and pain represents a potent threat to wellbeing (“In aching I am mine”). The exclamation mark in “Some Sundays I want to live a heartless life!” recalls the effervescence of Frank O’Hara, but even as Fain titles a poem Against Feeling she remains aware that “Grief is fact”. “It’s easy, deleting my way out of myself” comes the conclusion, as she backs into the limelight of these drolly personable poems.
