photo © Stuart Leech

Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path (Faber) has been shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, judged this year by Imtiaz Dharker, Tim Supple and Jo Shapcott.

The other six nominees are Jackie Kay for Maw Broon Monologues, Dannie Abse for New Selected Poems 1949-2009: Anniversary Collection, Paul Farley for Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008), John Glenday for Grain, Alice Oswald for Weeds and Wild Flowers and Chris Agee for Next To Nothing.

Andrew Motion is to judge the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010.

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New titles
THE CINDER PATH (Faber) poems
WAYS OF LIFE: On Places, Painters and Poets (Faber) new collection of essays
IN THE BLOOD A Memoir of my Childhood (Faber)‘The most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read … a passionate account of a man’s love for his parents and for the countryside in which he grew up … In the Blood will always be Andrew Motion’s elegy to his mother. For those of us fortunate enough to read this superlative memoir, it’s a celebration of mothers everywhere.’ Charlie Lee-Potter, Independent on Sunday

Coming soon
LAURELS AND DONKEYS (Clutag Press) is a collection of war poems which presents scenes from various conflicts of the 20th & 21st centuries - from the First World War to the war in Afghanistan

HOLY ISLAND

I am behind you on the mainland, leaning
on your shoulder and pointing with one arm
in front of your face at weightless cinders
which are ravens blustering above the island.

Boulder clay on the outcrops, and beaches
dotted and dashed with coal dust. Guillemots
whitening the cliff face. Small orchids definitely
still evolving in a downpour of Arctic sunlight.

How many years are there left to cross over
and show you things themselves, not my idea
of things? Thirty, if I live to the age of my father.
I cannot explain why I have left it as late as this.

Your black hair blows into my eyes but I can see
everything moving fast now. Weather polishes
the silver fields ahead; the ravens swoop down
and settle among the gorgeous pages of the gospels.

© Andrew Motion