Description
Andrew Waterhouse
Andrew’s In won the Forward First Collection Prize in 2000. It’s an amazing book: “his poetry reveals an absolute artistic seriousness and perfectionism” says Sean O’Brien. We still have a few copies of the reprint remaining.
Looking for the Comet
You push back the sheet, leave me
naked and cooling in the night air.
You stand by the window,
by the yellow flowers in their blue vase
and there’s the moon on your face and shoulders.
“It’s here,” you say, but I’m pretending sleep,
and just watch you, watching the comet
moving off towards the sun and beyond.
A car passes. Headlights fill the window,
making new shadows, that rise, then fall.
You take a flower from the vase,
carry it to me in both hands, slowly wipe
the petals over my face. Now, I can smell
the pollen on my skin, feel the trail.
Author Biog
Andrew Waterhouse was born in Lincolnshire in 1958 and died in October 2001. He lived in Northumberland where he worked as a teacher and a freelance writer. He won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2000. A second volume, 2nd, featuring poems Andrew was gathering into a collection at the time of his death was published in 2002.
‘I love Andrew Waterhouse’s poems for the pleasure they take in the language, their panache. They’re necessary poems: disturbing fables, intriguing anthropological investigations into life around the end of the century.’
Michael Laskey
‘The poems of Andrew Waterhouse bring together the landscape, the mind and the fragile connections between people. The ambitious mixture is sometimes disturbing, sometimes extraordinarily serene, but always compelling. The few remarkable poems left to us deserve to be read well and often.’
Jo Shapcott
(The Rialto First Collection Series 2000)
ISBN 0-9527444-1-4
2nd Edition.
