Book description
In this book Andrew Motion has made his own choice from his
outstandingly fine and varied body of work. Dramatic monologues,
elegies, poems of social and political observation, love lyrics - all
are part of this important poet's repertoire. Andrew Motion's concern
for the extremes of human experience and the artistic integrity that
insists on his addressing the reader with maximum clarity and impact
are consistent features of a career otherwise remarkable for its
imaginative range and technical versatility.
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.
