Andrew Motion

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 poets repertoire. Andrew Motions 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.

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.

Love in a Life, Andrew Motions 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 Motions 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.

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 others 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?

Philip Larkin: A Writers Life won the Whitbread Award for Biography in 1993 and was championed as an exemplary biography of its kind (The Times). With a new introduction written by the author, this edition offers an engrossing portrait of one of the twentieth centurys most popular, and most private, poets. There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motions, like Forsters of Dickens, will always have a special place. John Carey, Sunday TimesLarkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writers life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the mans frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary Life of him. Peter Conrad, ObserverHonest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motions book could not be bettered. Alan Bennett, London Review of Books

The second half of Andrew Motions new collection returns to the sequence begun in Laurels and Donkeys, completing a body of work recognised by the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award in 2014. These meditations on combat and the people caught up in it look back to conflicts of the past: to the war to end all wars; to Rupert Brooke on his final journey; to Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital; to Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the day of his fatal shooting. But Motion also depicts the ravages of modern warfare through reported speech, redacted documents, and vivid evocations of place, his plain understatement bringing the magnitude of war home to our own shores. These poems are moving and measured, delicate and clear-eyed, and bear witness to the futility of war and the suffering of those left behind.Elsewhere we find biographies in miniature, dreams and visions, family histories, which in their range of forms and voices consider questions of identity, and character. These are poems of remembrance in which Motions war poems, all in their own way elegies, find a natural partner. Peace Talks is a wise and compassionate work.

Andrew Motions new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels and Donkeys, on Armistice Day 2010), drawing on soldiers experiences of war from 1914 until today - beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon and moving via World War Two and Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the poems are in the voices of combatants, others are based on memories of the poets father, who landed at D-day and fought in France and Germany. The poems combine understatement with a clear-eyed and unswerving candour.The Customs House has other rooms: a group of topographies, mapping moments in a marriage against the contingencies of place and family history; and several found poems, in which the poet collaborates with his source, mixing what is there already with what is about to be there: whether a remarkable sonnet sequence on the last days of the Baroque genius Francesco Borromini, or in other poems a richly imagined extrapolation from the silent premises of a painting.

A bald summary does no justice to the subtlety and exceptional lucidity of a book which turns the bland, familiar, intrinsically worthy stuff of so many fictional family sagas into a biographical triumph.ObserverMotion has given us an exemplary piece of research, and a comparison of three eras that is of compelling interest, not least in showing what damage one generation does to the next.Sunday TimesThe story of the three Lamberts is as cruel and horrifying as any Greek tragedy. What it may lack in grandeur it makes up for in being true and recent. Its portrayal of the way in which the Lamberts instinctively yet unintentionally assisted in the destruction of their own offspring makes for truly compulsive reading.Harpers and Queen

Andrew Motions 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 poets father.

Andrew Motions expansive new collection is built around two long poems that form its opening and close. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration and current British and American politics. The more straightforwardly narrative poem, How Do the Dead Walk, while reaching back to immemorial stories of brutality, addresses issues of contemporary violence. The book is direct in its emotional appeal, ambitious in its scope, all the while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.

Andrew Motion has been close to the centres of British poetry for over fifty years.Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion - to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nations character. Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motions formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role.By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motions contention that the poems we most enjoy are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of lifes daily bread.

This comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motions distinguished body of work from Secret Narratives (1983) to his most recent volume, Randomly Moving Particles (2020), and includes a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems.Certain preoccupations unite the book, which from first to last is particularly concerned with the ways in which our lives are shaped by loss - by wars, by accidents, by the erosion of time and by grief. Motion is an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while his poems mostly develop his themes by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and documentary sources. In every case, and especially movingly in the long poem Essex Clay, Motion uses acts of personal witness to reflect the vulnerabilities of the world at large.These are extraordinary poems of and for our times, enlarging our sense of the cost of human experience even as they refine those sensibilities that keep us most alive and engaged with the present. Andrew Motion is one of the essential English poets of our time. John BurnsideMotions greatest and most distinctive gift . . . is to look squarely at the world and describe it with a plain and unsentimental eloquence that makes worldly value seem all the more questionable. Bernard ODonoghue, Independent on Sunday

Poetry by heart - based on the hugely successful nationwide schools competition, 200 magical poems to learn by heart.

Andrew Motions prose memoir, In the Blood (2006), was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval (Daily Telegraph) and a hymn to familial love (Independent). Now, having left UK shores and the bounds of his laureateship, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel - but this time, in verse.Essex Clay rekindles, expands and gives a tragic resonance to subjects that have haunted Andrew Motion throughout his writing life. In the first part he tells the story of his mothers riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second he remembers the end of his fathers much longer life; in the third he describes an encounter that deepens the poems tangled themes of loss and memory and retrieval. Although the prevailing mood of the poem has a Tennysonian sweep and melancholy, its wealth of vivid physical details and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are impossible.

Keats is the first major biography of this tragic hero of romanticism for some thirty years, and it differs from its predecessors in important respects. The outline of the story is well known - has become, in fact, the stuff of legend: the archetypal life of the tortured genius, critically spurned and dying young.What Andrew Motion brings to bear on the subject is a deep understanding of how Keats fitted into the intellectual and political life of his time. Important friendships with such anti-establishment figures as William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt are given their full due, and the closeness of his own spirit, as expressed in his poems, to the ferment all around is made clear. Many significant new facts about Keatss schooldays and medical training, in particular, enrich the picture. Keats emerges as a more political figure than he is usually portrayed, but his personal sufferings, too, come into closer focus. Most importantly, Andrew Motion - himself a distinguished poet and former poet laureate - demonstrates how the poems continue to exert their power. A definitive life of a great poet, and one of the finest biographies of the decade.New Statesman

Salt Water is Andrew Motions most ambitious collection, yet also his most accessible. The first part refines the narrative and lyric skills for which he is well-known, combining intense personal concerns with themes which are more expansive and social. Family and loved ones appear in the company of historical and legendary figures; private dramas raise large general issues. But there is concentration as well as diversity. From the Orford Merman of the title poem, to an elegy written for a friend who died on the Marchioness, to the vivid prose meditation of the second part, written when Andrew Motion retraced the voyage that John Keats made by sea from London to Naples in the autumn of 1820, the book insistently and brilliantly elaborates images of water. It is the element which facilitates a rich interweaving of past and present, of re-enacted experience and the poignant suspension of the lived-in moment.

Familiar poems and almost unknown poems. Love poems and war poems. Funny poems and heartbroken poems. Poems that re-create the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. Poetry by Heart is an essential collection of over 200 poems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Emily Dickinson, from Christina Rossetti to Benjamin Zephaniah, all carefully chosen for their suitability for learning and reciting. This is an anthology which celebrates the age-old pleasure of reciting poems - an anthology for all ages to treasure.