Come Here to this Gate, Rory Waterman’s fourth collection 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 North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken or not. The third opens on the poet’s home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, 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.

Waterman was born in Belfast and grew up mainly in Lincolnshire. He has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He also edited a collection of poetry by Lincolnshire poets for Five Leaves, Something Happens, Sometimes Here and in 2024 he’ll be working on a major project on Lincolnshire Folk Tales, a collaboration between NTU and various partners, including Five Leaves, and funded by the AHRC

With They Exchange Glances: gay modernist poems in translation we welcome back Gregory Woods, who has read here a number of times, and welcome Hercules Press, publisher of illustrated poetry books, for their first Five Leaves’ event.

This publication may be brief but it does include Lorca, Cavafy, Umberto Saba, Mikhail Kuzmin and others; with an essay and colour illustrations.

Gregory Woods’ latest academic work is Homintern: how gay culture liberated the modern world. He is currently working on a new poetry collection to be published by Carcanet.

Refreshments provided