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.
“Full of big themes such as courage, greed, loyalty and obsession, The New World is still an adventure story first and foremost. . . . An entertaining homage that is deeply felt and sincere.” —The Guardian (UK) Washed ashore after escaping Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins and his companion Natty find themselves stranded on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Their ship, the Nightingale, has been destroyed, and besides one other crew member, they are the only survivors. Before they can even grasp the full scope of their predicament, they realize they are not alone on the beach. When a band of Native Americans approaches the shore in a threatening fury, they brutally kill Jim and Natty’s last shipmate, rob their dead crew, and take the two desperate survivors hostage. Suddenly, Jim and Natty are thrust into an adventure that takes them all across the unruly American South. Starting with a desperate escape from a violent chief who obsessively keeps close on their trail, they join up with a troupe of entertainers who take them to a thriving and dangerous New Orleans, and seek the closest port so they can set sail for home once again. In magnificent, free-wheeling prose and in a high-flying style, Andrew Motion has spun a fantastic yarn that will win the hearts of adventure lovers everywhere.
Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. 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. It is a clarifying action and reaction between terra and solar system, mundanity and possibility, taking us from the grit of road surfaces to the distant glimpses of satellites. The final poem, “How Do the Dead Walk,” combines mythic reach with acute observation of the familiar, in order to address issues of contemporary violence. It is altogether more dreamlike, even in its tangibly military moments, grasping as it does at phantoms and intermediate plains. Andrew Motion’s expansive new poetry collection is direct in its emotional appeal and ambitious in its scope, all while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.
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.
Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer
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?
This comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motion's 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 Burnside 'Motion's 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 O'Donoghue, Independent on Sunday
July, 1802. In the marshy eastern reaches of the Thames, a young boy spends his days roaming the mist-shrouded estuaries and listening to his father's tales of adventures: on the high seas, of curses, murder and revenge, black spots and buried treasure--and of a man with a wooden leg. It's almost forty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins now runs an inn called the Hispaniola on the English coast with his son, Jim, and Long John Silver has returned to England to live in obscurity with his daughter, Natty. Their lives are quiet and unremarkable; their adventures have seemingly ended. But for Jim and Natty, the adventure is just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the rest of the treasure that their fathers left behind so many years before. Jim joins Natty aboard a ship--the Nightingale--and the new friends set out to sail in their fathers' footsteps. But their journey is fraught with murderous pirates, long-held grudges, and greed and deception lurking in every corner. When they arrive on Treasure Island, they find terrible scenes awaiting them and difficulties which require all their wit as well as their courage. Nor does the adventure end there, since they have to sail homeward again... Andrew Motion has written a truly accomplished work of literature--rollicking, heartfelt, and utterly brilliant--that would make Robert Louis Stevenson proud.
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.
In the Blood is Andrew Motion's beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England - an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a terrible riding accident. The tragedy shadows the book, feeding its mood of elegy as well as its celebratory vigilance. Written from a teenage child's point of view, without the benefit of adult hindsight, Motion captures the pathos and puzzlement of childhood with great clarity of expression and freshness of memory. We encounter a strange but beguiling extended family, a profound love of the natural world, a troubled schooling, and a growing passion for books and writing. By turns funny and elegiac, In the Blood is a wonderful picture of a vanishing England, a remarkable insight into a poet's mind, and a deeply moving portrait of the bond between a mother and her son.
Families are societies in miniature.' The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1987. A lesson in the fragility of fame, it tells the tragic story of three generations: George, one of Australia's leading painters; his talented composer-conductor son Constant; and grandson Kit, who managed the pop group The Who. 'Motion's project is not just to tell the story of passing generations, which he does very readably and well, but necessarily also to describe and evaluate aspects of English culture - revivalist painting, classical music in the Twenties and Thirties, the foundation of a native ballet, pop music in the Sixties - which he does with considerable confidence and resource.' London Review of Books 'The story of the three Lamberts is as cruel and horrifying as any Greek tragedy... 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 'An exemplary piece of research' (Sunday Times). 'A biographical triumph.' Observer
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 nation's 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 Motion's 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 Motion's contention that the poems we most enjoy 'are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life's daily bread'.
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." --Publisher.
The Mower introduces the poetry of British poet laureate Andrew Motion to American readers for the first time. This selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself, is an outstanding representation of the poet's varied body of work--elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation, and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, and natural life--composed over the course of three decades.
‘I always liked your father – he was a lad of spirit. He was clever enough to know the value of an adventure, at any rate, and brave enough to carry it out!’ ‘What adventure?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer. ‘Why the map of course, boy!’ Long John Silver’s voice rose into something of a scream. ‘The map and then the treasure across the sea! All the beautiful silver we left there. Your father and I only took what we could carry. But there’s more. Silver lying in the ground and the map will tell you where. Think of the fortune waiting for you’ With that encouragement, young Jim Hawkins and Silver’s daughter Natty set off in the footsteps of their fathers. They are determined to find Captain Flint’s hidden treasure. But the thrill of the ocean journey soon gives way to terror as the Nightingale reaches its destination. Treasure Island is not uninhabited as it once was...
Andrew Motion's 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 poet's father.
From England’s former Poet Laureate, a collection of selected poetry spanning his celebrated career, presented for the first time by an American publisher Andrew Motion has said, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp." Though the territory of his exploration may be murky and mired—the front lines of war, political entanglements, romantic longing, and human suffering—Motion’s conversational tone and lyrical style make for clear, bold poems that speak to contradictions at the heart of the human condition. Whether underground in an urban metro, in the poet’s home, on the steps leading up to Anne Frank’s annex, or wading in the Norfolk broads, Motion’s richly imagined landscapes contain unspoken mysteries underneath the poet’s candor. In the tradition of English pastoral poetry that includes Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and William Wordsworth, these poems skate over sweeping empires and plumb emotional depths, settling in a meditative, understated register. As an introduction to one of England’s most lauded living poets, English Elegies offers a moving depiction of this writer’s career as a chronicler of modernity’s pitfalls and triumphs.
Andrew Motion brings all his lyricism and inventiveness to bear in this fictional autobiography of the great swindler, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A painter, writer, and friend of Blake, Byron, and Keats, Wainewright was almost certainly a murderer. When he died in a penal colony in Tasmania, he left behind fragments of documents and a beguiling legend which Motion uses to create an imagined confession laced with facts, telling the story as no straightforward history could. "Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is a dream subject for either novelist or biographer. . . . Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate, clearly felt that neither straight biography nor pure fiction would do Wainewright's complexities justice, and so he combined the two genres. The result is stunning. The central voice is that of Wainewright himself, reflecting back on his life. After each chapter Mr. Motion has added detailed notes that inform and flesh out the narrative, giving not only his own informed opinion of Wainewright's actions but also those of Wainewright's contemporaries and the scholars and writers who have studied him over the past two centuries."—Lucy Moore, Washington Times "Brilliantly innovative, gripping, intricately researched, Motion's biography does justice to its subject at last."—John Carey, The Sunday Times "Engaging and convincing. . . . The trajectory of this character-from neglected and resentful child to arrogant and envious London dandy to sociopathic murderer on to an enfeebled, frightened prisoner-is indelibly imagined and drawn."—Edmund White, Financial Times "[A] fascinating look at an evil artist, a charmer still having his way with us. We can hear him being economical with the truth, telling us and himself just what he wants to hear."—Michael Olmert, New Jersey Star Ledger "Motion crafts a fascinating tale as complex and compelling as if Wainewright himself had written it."—Michael Spinella, Booklist "Did he kill his servant, and possibly others as well? . . . The footnotes seem to say yes, but Wainewright adamantly argues his own case. Motion's prose is flawless, and Wainewright's voice is convincing. But in the long run, it's this ambiguity that makes Wainewright the Poisoner a fascinating and memorable read."—R.V. Schelde, Sacramento News and Review "Who could as for a better Romantic villain than Thomas Griffiths Wainewright? . . . [The book] succeeds on many levels: as an act of ventriloquism, a work of scholarship, a psychological study, as a set of sharp portraits of famous men and an engrossing read. . . ."—Polly Shulman, Newsday "Instead of a straightforward biography, Andrew Motion gives us Wainewright's first person, fictionalized "confession."—a document as circumspect, slyly reticent, and oeaginously smooth as the man himself. Splendid."—John Banville, Literary Review "A genuine tour de force, and on a non-fictional level, a telling portrait of a strange, intriguing and repellant man."—Brian Fallon, Irish Times "A marvelous literary hybrid that totters with one foot in the world of nonfiction, the other in the land of make-believe. One is alternatively swept up in Motion's dizzy imaginative pastiche, or sent crashing into a dusty stack of scholarly cogitations. . . ."—Philadelphia Inquirer "As true a portrait of a liar as its subject could wish. Rich and strange. . . ."—Glasgow Herald
A tremendous sentimental education of a book ... a literary adventure ... chosen with a scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair ... fascinating and unignorable' Kate Kellaway, Observer (Poetry Book of the Month) 'If you have any weakness at all for poetry, this book will draw you in, then devastate you' Susie Goldsbrough. The Times Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Denise Riley. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.
The Mower introduces the poetry of British poet laureate Andrew Motion to American readers for the first time. This selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself, is an outstanding representation of the poet's varied body of work? elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation, and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, and natural life? composed over the course of three decades. About his poetry, Motion has observed: I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin. Indeed, a significant and consistent feature of Motion's work, throughout his shifts in style and changes in imaginative topographies, is his signature clarity of observation, his unwillingness to sacrifice intelligibility or embrace opacity. Instead, Motion employs the full power of the English language to do his bidding, and, in love with words as he is, the words cooperate, communicate? transforming the intangible, the abstract into intelligible images, associations, and ultimately, knowledge. In his role as poet laureate for the past ten years, Motion has worked to make poetry more widely available to the general public free of charge (through his online archiving of poets reading their work at The Poetry Archive) and has tried to demystify verse, saying simply, The best poems are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget. Any heavier definition than that begins to collapse under its own weight and exclude many forms of poetry. Motion's own lyrical poems, many written in formal meter and rhyme, speak to us clearly and memorably, meeting his own challenge with flying colors.
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.
Poetry by Heart - based on the hugely successful nationwide schools competition, 200 magical poems to learn by heart 'The poems we learn stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become personal and invaluable, and what's more they are free gifts - there for the taking' Simon Armitage Two years ago former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had the idea of setting up Poetry by Heart - a nationwide annual competition for secondary schools which asked contestants to learn two or three poems and be judged on their recitations, first at school level, then regional, then in a national final held at London's National Portrait Gallery. It's proved a huge success, with hundreds of schools participating in the first year, and numbers up by 20% in the second. Coinciding with the start of the third year of competition, and published on National Poetry Day whose theme coincidentally in 2014 is Recitation, this Poetry by Heart anthology brings together the pool of poems - 200 altogether - from which contestants make their choices. Specially picked by Motion and his three co-editors, these poems make up a treasure house - of almost-unknown poems and familiar poems from the mainstream; love poems and war poems; funny poems and heartbroken poems; poems that recreate the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. And all chosen with a view to their being recited out loud. From William Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen, Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bishop this wonderfully enjoyable anthology will be enjoyed by all ages and includes the best poets from the past to the present day. In a groundbreaking feature, the book includes QR codes which allow readers to use their mobile phones to listen to recordings of the poems - many of them specially recorded by the poets themselves. Sir Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 till 2009, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Jean Sprackland'sTilt won the Costa Poetry award in 2008. She is a Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie Blake is co-Founder and Director of The Full English, an organization based in Bristol which provides support to teachers of English Literature. Mike Dixon is an educational consultant specializing in English in the classroom.
What is the truth about the mysterious Dr Cake? Why, at his funeral, is there no name on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin-lid? Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, has written a tantalising novel about poets and their afterlife.
There are those unique individuals who can view life -- all of its triumphs, tragedies, people, places and events -- and put those observations in a written form that moves or inspires us. Andrew J. Eaton has encapsulated life's ups and downs and, from his soulspeak, created a poetic and beautiful rendering in Poetry in Motion or Speedbumps of Life. This anthology of poetry explores the territories of the human psyche -- love, loss, joy, grief and forgiveness. Gleaning inspiration from his own personal life lessons, Eaton gets to the core of human emotion -- how pain can be a path toward healing, how losing love can inspire one to love him or herself, how music, works of art, films and everyday happenings can inspire us to take a leap of faith, and how the humanness in others can make us realize how we are all the same -- we want to be loved, listened to, and feel a connection to the world. Poetry in Motion or Speedbumps of Life is a collection of work to be savored slowly, with reflection and a calm and open spirit. After reading, you may just realize your own dreams are truly possible.
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