New book tour
ESSEX CLAY
Faber, pub June’18

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 the UK’s shores, 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 Motion throughout his writing life.

Fri 1 June LONDON Tara Arts 7.30pm 020 8333 4457 
Sat 2 June BIRMINGHAM mac 7.30pm 0121 446 3232
Mon 4 June BELLAGHY Seamus Heaney HomePlace 7.30pm 028 7938 7444 
Wed 6 June KENDAL Brewery 7.30pm 01539 725133 
Thurs 7 June  sold out NATIONAL TRUST Wordsworth House 7.30pm 01900 824805
Fri 8 June LUDLOW Assembly Rooms 7.30pm 01584 878141
Tues 12 June LONDON St George’s Church, Bloomsbury - Faber Members & the London Review Bookshop, with Alan Hollinghurst 7.00pm 
Wed 13 June STREET Strode Theatre 7.30pm 01458 442846 
Fri 15 June STAMFORD Arts Centre 7.30pm 01780 763203 

The poem’s wealth of physical detail and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are impossible.

'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 world value seem all the more questionable.' Independent on Sunday

'Andrew Motion's reading at York Literature Festival was a moving occasion. The audience was utterly silent as the ex poet-laureate read meditations on love, time, loss and eternity. Motion understands the power of understatement in both writing and performance. It was powerful stuff indeed.' Miles Salter

'We could do with a day like yesterday every day in our libraries !!!' Julie Barkway, Wirral Libraries

THE POETRY ARCHIVE
The Poetry Archive is open all hours www.poetryarchive.org 

IN THE BLOOD A Memoir of my Childhood
'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