Book description
In his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew
Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and
public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In the opening
series of idylls he conjures the expeditionary narratives of a rural
childhood, in scenes as precisely remembered as they are
irretrievable. Elsewhere he reconsiders moments from the Victorian
past from reticent and surprising angles, and elsewhere again he
tackles distinctly contemporary themes and situations. The final
section of the book contains a number of elegies and love poems,
written in a variety of lyric forms, which provoke concerns that are
among the most critical in poetry: What is public art? To whom do our
most private sentiments belong?
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.
