Book description
Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in
2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and
elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a
shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the
world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens.
The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes
and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities. Here
are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems
which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of
prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or
the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness
just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the
detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas
of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable
group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of
the poet's father.
Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999; he is
Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of
London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received
numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated
biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham
Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize
for Biography. Andrew Motion's novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003)
was described as 'amazingly clever' by the Irish Times and praised for
'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' by the Sunday
Telegraph. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most
moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever
read' in the Independent on Sunday. Andrew Motion was knighted for his
services to literature in 2009.
