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

From an extraordinary poetic career and including new and previously uncollected poems, this selection draws together work that in a variety of ways offers intimate reflections on memory and the cost of human experience.

About the Author
Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. His memoir Sleeping on Islands is also published this year. He lives in Baltimore, where he is Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.


Book Information
ISBN 9780571338559
Author Sir Andrew Motion
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 405g
Dimensions(mm) 224mm * 145mm * 22mm