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The Customs House
Andrew Motion's 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 poet's 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.
Essex Clay
Andrew Motion's 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 mother's riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second he remembers the end of his father's much longer life; in the third he describes an encounter that deepens the poem's 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.
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin: A Writer's 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 century's most popular, and most private, poets. 'There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motion's, like Forster's of Dickens, will always have a special place.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary 'Life' of him.' Peter Conrad, Observer 'Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion's book could not be bettered.' Alan Bennett, London Review of Books
Keats
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 Keats's 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
Salt Water is Andrew Motion's 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.
Peace Talks
The second half of Andrew Motion's 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 Motion's war poems, all in their own way elegies, find a natural partner. Peace Talks is a wise and compassionate work.
The Lamberts
'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.' Observer'Motion 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 Times'The 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
The Poetry Of Edward Thomas
When Edward Thomas died at Arras in 1917 few people thought of him as a poet. Yet in the two years before his death, after a lifetime writing prose, Thomas wrote some of the most enduring poems of his day: poems of war, nature, friendship, despair and exultation. Andrew Motion's pioneering study of Thomas' life and achievement is scholarly yet utterly absorbing, combining an account of his struggles as a writer with perceptive readings of individual poems. Andrew Motion's books include a biography, The Lamberts, George, Constant and Kil, and several prize-winning collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Love in a Life. He is currently writing the authorized biography of Philip Larkin.
In the Blood
A portrait of the bond between a mother and her son, and the capturing of a moment in time before the loss of childhood innocence.
Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
Philip Larkin: A Writer's 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 century's most popular, and most private, poets. 'There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motion's, like Forster's of Dickens, will always have a special place.' John Carey, Sunday Times'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary 'Life' of him.' Peter Conrad, Observer'Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion's book could not be bettered.' Alan Bennett, London Review of Books
