Book description
Love in a Life, Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry, marks a
conspicuous development in the work of the founder of the modern
Narrative School. Directness and a new colloquialism are wedded to
Motion's distinctive obliquities in a volume where the idea of
marriage governs the architecture of each poem and the book as a
whole. The stories of two marriages gradually emerge, like chapters in
a narrative, and are themselves bound to more public material, so that
each lends profound resonances to the other.
Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009; 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. His most recent collection of poems, The Cinder Path (2009),
was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Andrew
Motion was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009.
