Book description
This volume brings together two long poems. 'Lines of Desire' tells
the story of an individual in crisis, under pressure from past and
present events. 'Joe Soap' combines narrative and lyric forms to trace
a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary
apocalypse. Both are remarkable additions to an important body of work.
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.
