New and selected poems 1977-2022

£14.99

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 erosions of time and by grief. But as a poet Andrew Motion is also an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while the shapes and voices of the poems mostly prove this by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and collaborate with documentary sources.

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Description

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

Additional information

Weight 405 g
Dimensions 22.4 × 14.5 × 2.2 cm
Author

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

128

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

821.92 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K