"Tonight the Summer's Over" by Rory Waterman

I think I will give up reading poetry. I just don't know enough about it, and it is arrogant to endeavour to review it. I don't understand the standards against which I should compare it; I don't have the instinct born of sufficient educated connoisseurship to enable me to judge how good a poem is. I am ignorant and ignorance cannot assess.

I can understand some of the mechanics. I might be able to judge a poem as a machine. Here's an iamb, this line is a pentameter, here we have a rhyme pattern that follows the rules for a Petrarchan sonnet. But I don't know how to turn these artificial rules into understanding. It is like trying to appreciate wine by describing the shape of the bottle.

There are, I am sure, some remarkable poems in this collection. I learned a lot about the author and his troubled childhood. Some of the poems were based on standard patterns although the poet often failed to obey the rules it seemed he had imposed upon himself. Thus, for example, Family Business is a sort of sonnet: there are fourteen lines with a rhyming pattern ABBA CDDC EFFE GG; however, the scansion is not the iambic pentameters normal to sonnets (though some lines are and they are all nearly; they are pentameters but the feet vary); there isn’t a clear division between the first eight and the last six; and some of the rhymes aren’t quite.

I can understand that a single rule breakage can signal something momentous, like a half line in Virgil, but the rule breakage here seemed too frequent to be like that. I suppose it simply meant that the poet wanted the words to stand by themselves rather than to play second fiddle to an artificial structure. 

He certainly doesn't like the convention that each line of poetry should start with a capital.

There are a lot of families. In Visiting Grandpa a young girl plays with her grandfather's medals; but she isn't allowed to go to his funeral. There are a number of poems about the poet as a boy splitting his time between his divorced parents: mother in Lincolnshire and father in Northern Ireland. The narrator reacts to a baby in Seeing Baby Emrys in Gwynedd and a toddler in Stranger.

There are some great lines:

... you’re holding hands

with a wise dead owl, and learning something

inscrutable you still can’t understand.

Retrospect

... I stop
and tut and tap the wheel and find a sweet
and scrape it through its wrapper with my teeth
What Passing Bells

pallid in a damp-thick
whinny of breezing rain.
In the Avenue of Limes

Is growing older, then, forced unclenching?
An email from your mother

Arctic terns head-butt spume
Faroe Islands: notes for three photographs

A bee revs its engine
and limps from stamen
to stamen, then lifts,
chicanes to the trees.
Reverdie

... stretch-torsoed in the faraway
A suicide

... Then a two-foot scruff
with saucer eyes waddles to my knee,
fingers his nose as if uncorking it,
and asks me plainly, sweetly, who I am.
Stranger

And beyond them the nothing sun is falling through nothing
This Shipwreck Memorial a Mile from Town

July 2019