Please join us to celebrate the launch of Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman. The reading will be hosted by poet and critic Declan Ryan. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Come Here to this Gate, Rory Waterman’s fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: ‘your silences were trains departing’. The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet’s rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a ‘doll left behind at Chernobyl’ must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.

‘I have long admired Rory Waterman’s honest, often very sensitive, pitch-perfect poetry. He has the ability to capture, without appearing too knowing, that which is at the edge of the mind. The diverse poems in Come Here to This Gate are enticingly open to both life’s realities and its unrealities. They include acute and moving poems on his father’s dying and on parental separation and its after-effects. This is surely his most deeply resonant and versatile book.’ – Moniza Alvi

‘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… Suppleness of poetic line matches suppleness of spirit.’ – Linda Gregson

About the speakers:

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up mainly in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. His previous full-length collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; and Sweet Nothings (2020). He is also a press critic, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University.

Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor was published in 2023.