Many contemporary poems – tonally flat, medicinal blocks of prose – do not encourage reading aloud, so the four reworked Lincolnshire folk tales of Rory Waterman’s Come Here to This Gate are a treat. Waterman has mastered that unfashionable form, the narrative poem. Anapaests, enjambment and witty rhymes (‘Lidl’ and ‘idyll’) propel these cathartic bursts of comic strangeness. His stories of Yallery Brown and the Metheringham Lass lift the reader at the end of a book exploring, with a Larkinesque eye, the quotidian world of house-hunting, chiropody and that peculiar period of social distancing. ‘When will this bloody thing end?’ a mother asks her son, ‘gesturing a happy hug across her yard.’

The everyday at its most intense is the focus of the book’s opening section, an unflinching account of the final year of the poet’s alcoholic father, who died of dementia during the pandemic. The son neither shies away from the bleak details – his father’s ‘sippy-cup’ and ‘piss-proof seat/on wheels’ or how ‘His nappy fills beneath the blanket/as he talks about school’. Nor does he sentimentalise their relationship, ruptured in the son’s infancy, when the family fell apart. Telephone calls are difficult, as are visits to the nursing home, which are likely to end peremptorily: ‘I fucked off when you said to.’

What is most impressive here is not Waterman’s frankness or the risk that his unsparing descriptions might seem vengeful, but the artistry of the whole enterprise. Writers often resort to fragmentary modes to capture mental disintegration; Waterman instead explores that state with artful methods – an oblique tribute to his