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WAYS OF LIFE: Places, Painters and Poets (Faber) new collection of essays, pub.Sept'08.

THE POETRY ARCHIVE now open! www.poetryarchive.org 

IN THE BLOOD A Memoir of my Childhood (Faber) childhood autobiography out now

‘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

This is a marvellous book. It describes rural upper class England with exactness, candour and humour … Finally, and most importantly, it's a wonderful read. Every word, sentence and chapter, one drinks down with joy because it is so artfully and beautifully composed.’ Carlo Gebler, Irish Times

‘It is the work of the poet to redeem our awareness of the mystery and complexity of the commonplace, and In The Blood does this wonderfully … Shadowed by loss, Motion’s recollections of the people and animals and weather that flicker across the East Anglian countryside become more vivid, because these treasured lives and moments are so perishable. The book's triumph, however, is to show that, alongside this sense of the transience of our individual concerns, something else emerges, something not to be understood in the ordinary way but sensed, accepted and, as a single fabric of beauty and wonder, hurt and dismay, celebrated.’ John Burnside, Scotland on Sunday 

‘Exquisitely written … Memory is the dominant theme, and the pool from which Andrew Motion draws is clear and deep, enabling him to fix experience in unusually minute and textured detail.’ Selina Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

‘A beautifully evocative memoir of [Andrew Motion’s] East Anglia childhood, made all the more potent by the event that abruptly ended it … he looks back across the years with an extraordinary vividness.’ Susan Mansfield, Scotsman

‘In the Blood is Motion’s elegy for his lost childhood and his lost mother. It is also the portrait of a whole English world that thought it was finished. And last, but far from least, it’s the story of the growth of a writer … Motion doesn’t attempt to explain: he has decided only to tell, and to tell from the point of view of the child he was, not of the man looking back. This he does very well. He captures with quivering clarity his childish bewilderment, his adolescent self-consciousness and – always – the isolation in his own imagination of the born writer … [His mother] made him a writer – her storytelling, her (half)culture, but most of all her loss. All of Andrew Motion’s writing is a form of mourning for his mother, and this book shows us why.’ Carole Angier, Literary Review 

‘An incredible story, written with courage, sensitivity and humour.’ Julie Myerson, She Magazine

‘The great value of a memoir such as this is not only its revelation of someone else’s experiences, someone else’s consciousness, but the realisation of how much we share. He does write beautifully, of course, but I expected that; what’s given me even more pleasure is the amber-like quality of his memory, and the things I found myself recalling in sympathy.’ Philip Pullman

‘Deeply engaging … the innocence and the hardness of childhood are beautifully put together ... it’s a strikingly good book, framed by tragedy but full of intense life.’ Helen Dunmore

WHAT HAVE WE HERE?

Dad got home late, and I never heard the gravel
Or his door-clunk in the drive-through,
Still less his shoeless step
As he crept to perch on my bedside.
‘What have we here?’
It was a Yeomanry day or used to be,
And not even the thick whiskery cloth
Of his battle-dress trousers
Could blunt the edge of a Ladybird under the covers.

‘Nelson, dad.’ He squared his shoulders.
The order was: no reading after lights out, 
So I was caught cold – like the polar bear
I’d just seen dispatched
In the pack-ice off Spitzbergen.
On the other hand, Nelson was England’s darling.
I’d seen that too, in the cock-pit death-scene
With Hardy’s kiss on my forehead.
Dad checked a page, before his weight lifted and went.

I fell at once into a dream of Victory –
How she wallowed through Biscay,
With her battle-tatters smoking –
Then gave my signal for a change in nature.
At which she side-stepped her Channel lane,
Shimmied over the Hampshire hills,
Caught the surge of London,
And made fast to a spire of Westminster
Overlooking Trafalgar Square.

With that, the famous brandy barrel
Burst its ropes at the main mast,
And the man himself slithered out
Crumpled and glistening as a baby
But perfectly fit again.
He proved this by scaling the column
A grateful nation had raised for him,
And leaned on his coil of rope to wait
For as long as it took to stiffen into stone.

Next morning, with dad in his city suit again,
I woke in time to snaffle his Times at breakfast
And rolled it into a telescope
So I could show him my grasp of history.
‘What have we here?’
This time of course I couldn’t answer.
The thing was pressed to my blind left eye,
And supposing I’d said ‘Your face’
He would know I was only inventing things.

© Andrew Motion, 17.10.05

SPRING WEDDING

I took your news outdoors, and strolled a while
In silence on my square of garden-ground
Where I could dim the roar of arguments,
Ignore the scandal-flywheel whirring round,

And hear instead the green fuse in the flower
Ignite, the breeze stretch out a shadow-hand
To ruffle blossom on its sticking points,
The blackbirds sing, and singing take their stand.

I took your news outdoors, and found the Spring
Had honoured all its promises to start
Disclosing how the principles of earth
Can make a common purpose with the heart.

The heart which slips and sidles like a stream
Weighed down by winter-wreckage near its source –
But given time, and come the clearing rain,
Breaks loose to revel in its proper course.


© Andrew Motion, 9.4.05