Sarajevo Roses

Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Watermans second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move. On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palmas Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Kruj, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peters Basilica in Vatican City, where `selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar. Sarajevos `neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete is twinned with the `church spires and rain-bright roofs of the poets former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the books title a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.