New Releases by Andrew Motion

This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2024/2025 issue, Number 32. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). Includes the winning stories and poems from the 2024 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists. ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."-Dana Gioia. "Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life."-NewPages. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2024 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists EDITORIAL – Alexander Pepple FEATURED ART – A Reflection Theme TRIBUTE TO JOSEPH HARRISON FEATURE: Tribute Guest Editor: Stephen Kampa Tribute Poetry: Joseph Harrison, Andrew Motion, Jennifer Keith Tribute Essays: Stephen Kampa, Philip Hoy, Joe Osterhaus, Ned Balbo FICTION – Rob Wright ESSAY – J. Eric Miller BOOK REVIEWS – Rachel Hadas, Alexander Pepple POETRY – Rebekah Wolman, Joshua Coben, Ben Corvo, Susan McLean, Stephen Gibson, Bruce Bennett, Elijah Perseus Blumov, Catherine Chandler, Adam Tavel, Julia B. Griffin, John Glowney, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Stephen Gibson

From the former Poet Laureate, a remarkable contemplation of departure and return. Andrew Motion's new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the long title sequence which completes the book, he explores the ways in which regrets compete with hope, and the appetite for life is always a prey to hard facts of mortality. The energy and reach of these poems opens a new chapter in Motion's writing, remaining true to the elegiac subjects which have always been his main concern, while adding new depths of pathos and resonance.

'A tremendous sentimental education of a book ... a literary adventure ... chosen with a scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair ... fascinating and unignorable' Kate Kellaway, Observer (Poetry Book of the Month) 'If you have any weakness at all for poetry, this book will draw you in, then devastate you' Susie Goldsbrough. The Times Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Denise Riley. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.

Andrew Motion has been close to the centres of British poetry for over fifty years. Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion - to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nation's character. Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motion's formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role. By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motion's contention that the poems we most enjoy 'are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life's daily bread'.

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

Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration, and current British and American politics. It is a clarifying action and reaction between terra and solar system, mundanity and possibility, taking us from the grit of road surfaces to the distant glimpses of satellites. The final poem, “How Do the Dead Walk,” combines mythic reach with acute observation of the familiar, in order to address issues of contemporary violence. It is altogether more dreamlike, even in its tangibly military moments, grasping as it does at phantoms and intermediate plains. Andrew Motion’s expansive new poetry collection is direct in its emotional appeal and ambitious in its scope, all while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.

Motion's sixth poetry collection - a profound and tender exploration of 'marriage' - reissued as part of the poetry typographic series.

The stunning new sequence of poems from former poet laureate Andrew Motion.

Poetry by Heart - based on the hugely successful nationwide schools competition, 200 magical poems to learn by heart 'The poems we learn stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become personal and invaluable, and what's more they are free gifts - there for the taking' Simon Armitage Two years ago former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had the idea of setting up Poetry by Heart - a nationwide annual competition for secondary schools which asked contestants to learn two or three poems and be judged on their recitations, first at school level, then regional, then in a national final held at London's National Portrait Gallery. It's proved a huge success, with hundreds of schools participating in the first year, and numbers up by 20% in the second. Coinciding with the start of the third year of competition, and published on National Poetry Day whose theme coincidentally in 2014 is Recitation, this Poetry by Heart anthology brings together the pool of poems - 200 altogether - from which contestants make their choices. Specially picked by Motion and his three co-editors, these poems make up a treasure house - of almost-unknown poems and familiar poems from the mainstream; love poems and war poems; funny poems and heartbroken poems; poems that recreate the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. And all chosen with a view to their being recited out loud. From William Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen, Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bishop this wonderfully enjoyable anthology will be enjoyed by all ages and includes the best poets from the past to the present day. In a groundbreaking feature, the book includes QR codes which allow readers to use their mobile phones to listen to recordings of the poems - many of them specially recorded by the poets themselves. Sir Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 till 2009, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Jean Sprackland'sTilt won the Costa Poetry award in 2008. She is a Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie Blake is co-Founder and Director of The Full English, an organization based in Bristol which provides support to teachers of English Literature. Mike Dixon is an educational consultant specializing in English in the classroom.

Andrew Motion's new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels and Donkeys, on Armstice Day 2010), drawing on soldiers' experiences of war from 1914 until today - beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon and moving via World War Two and Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the poems are in the voices of combatants, others are based on memories of the poet's father, who landed at D-day and fought in France and Germany. The poems combine understatement with a clear-eyed and unswerving candour. The Customs House has other rooms: a group of topographies, mapping moments in a marriage against the contingencies of place and family history; and several 'found poems', in which the poet collaborates with his source, mixing what is there already with what is about to be there: whether a remarkable sonnet sequence on the last days of the Baroque genius Francesco Borromini, or in other poems a richly imagined extrapolation from the silent premises of a painting.

When Edward Thomas died at Arras in 1917 few people thought of him as a poet. Yet in the two years before his death, after a lifetime writing prose, Thomas wrote some of the most enduring poems of his day: poems of war, nature, friendship, despair and exultation. Andrew Motion's pioneering study of Thomas' life and achievement is scholarly yet utterly absorbing, combining an account of his struggles as a writer with perceptive readings of individual poems. Andrew Motion's books include a biography, The Lamberts, George, Constant and Kil, and several prize-winning collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Love in a Life. He is currently writing the authorized biography of Philip Larkin.

In his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In the opening series of idylls he conjures the expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood, in scenes as precisely remembered as they are irretrievable. Elsewhere he reconsiders moments from the Victorian past from reticent and surprising angles, and elsewhere again he tackles distinctly contemporary themes and situations. The final section of the book contains a number of elegies and love poems, written in a variety of lyric forms, which provoke concerns that are among the most critical in poetry: What is public art? To whom do our most private sentiments belong?

In this book Andrew Motion has made his own choice from his outstandingly fine and varied body of work. Dramatic monologues, elegies, poems of social and political observation, love lyrics - all are part of this important poet's repertoire. Andrew Motion's concern for the extremes of human experience and the artistic integrity that insists on his addressing the reader with maximum clarity and impact are consistent features of a career otherwise remarkable for its imaginative range and technical versatility.

This volume brings together two long poems. 'Lines of Desire' tells the story of an individual in crisis, under pressure from past and present events. 'Joe Soap' combines narrative and lyric forms to trace a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary apocalypse. Both are remarkable additions to an important body of work.

This selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself from three decades of work, is an outstanding representation of the British poet's varied body of work--elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation, and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, the natural world. About his poetry, Motion has observed: "I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realized. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin." A significant and consistent feature of Motion's work, throughout his shifts in style and changes in imaginative topographies, is his signature clarity of observation, his unwillingness to sacrifice intelligibility or embrace opacity. "The best poems," Motion has said, "are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget."

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. William Barnes was born in 1801 near Sturminster Newton in Dorset, of a farming family. He learned Greek, Latin and music, taught himself wood engraving, and in 1823 became a schoolmaster in Mere. He was deply interested in grammar and language, and waged a lifelong campaign to rid English of classical and foreign influences. Among his best-known books of poetry are Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844) and Homely Rhymes (1859. His work has often been praised for its evocations of Dorset life, landscape and customs; he also wrote political poems of great power and was a master elegist. Barnes died in 1886.

Eschewing the confessional or critical tone of some memoirs, and the investigatory or elucidatory approaches of others, Motion strives to recreate the voice and vision of the boy he once was, taking care not to sully or distort with hindsight what is felt to be still very much alive in memory. Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing in Scotland with his father, the horrors of prep school at the young age of seven, or his discovery of Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues his recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he will be; readers of Motion's poetry will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," as in the book's title and epigraph from Wordsworth, can be neither taken from us nor los

What is the truth about the mysterious Dr Cake? Why, at his funeral, is there no name on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin-lid? Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, has written a tantalising novel about poets and their afterlife.

Andrew Motion brings all his lyricism and inventiveness to bear in this fictional autobiography of the great swindler, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A painter, writer, and friend of Blake, Byron, and Keats, Wainewright was almost certainly a murderer. When he died in a penal colony in Tasmania, he left behind fragments of documents and a beguiling legend which Motion uses to create an imagined confession laced with facts, telling the story as no straightforward history could. "Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is a dream subject for either novelist or biographer. . . . Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate, clearly felt that neither straight biography nor pure fiction would do Wainewright's complexities justice, and so he combined the two genres. The result is stunning. The central voice is that of Wainewright himself, reflecting back on his life. After each chapter Mr. Motion has added detailed notes that inform and flesh out the narrative, giving not only his own informed opinion of Wainewright's actions but also those of Wainewright's contemporaries and the scholars and writers who have studied him over the past two centuries."—Lucy Moore, Washington Times "Brilliantly innovative, gripping, intricately researched, Motion's biography does justice to its subject at last."—John Carey, The Sunday Times "Engaging and convincing. . . . The trajectory of this character-from neglected and resentful child to arrogant and envious London dandy to sociopathic murderer on to an enfeebled, frightened prisoner-is indelibly imagined and drawn."—Edmund White, Financial Times "[A] fascinating look at an evil artist, a charmer still having his way with us. We can hear him being economical with the truth, telling us and himself just what he wants to hear."—Michael Olmert, New Jersey Star Ledger "Motion crafts a fascinating tale as complex and compelling as if Wainewright himself had written it."—Michael Spinella, Booklist "Did he kill his servant, and possibly others as well? . . . The footnotes seem to say yes, but Wainewright adamantly argues his own case. Motion's prose is flawless, and Wainewright's voice is convincing. But in the long run, it's this ambiguity that makes Wainewright the Poisoner a fascinating and memorable read."—R.V. Schelde, Sacramento News and Review "Who could as for a better Romantic villain than Thomas Griffiths Wainewright? . . . [The book] succeeds on many levels: as an act of ventriloquism, a work of scholarship, a psychological study, as a set of sharp portraits of famous men and an engrossing read. . . ."—Polly Shulman, Newsday "Instead of a straightforward biography, Andrew Motion gives us Wainewright's first person, fictionalized "confession."—a document as circumspect, slyly reticent, and oeaginously smooth as the man himself. Splendid."—John Banville, Literary Review "A genuine tour de force, and on a non-fictional level, a telling portrait of a strange, intriguing and repellant man."—Brian Fallon, Irish Times "A marvelous literary hybrid that totters with one foot in the world of nonfiction, the other in the land of make-believe. One is alternatively swept up in Motion's dizzy imaginative pastiche, or sent crashing into a dusty stack of scholarly cogitations. . . ."—Philadelphia Inquirer "As true a portrait of a liar as its subject could wish. Rich and strange. . . ."—Glasgow Herald

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

The latest collection from one of our finest narrative and lyrical poets. The new verse of Andrew Morton bears a strong Romantic imprint, with Keats, Shelley, Goethe and Napoleon making specific appearances throughout the course of the book.

'A bald summary does no justice to the subtlety and exceptional lucidity of a book which turns the bland, familiar, intrinsically worthy stuff of so many fictional family sagas into a biographical triumph.' Observer 'Motion has given us an exemplary piece of research, and a comparison of three eras that is of compelling interest, not least in showing what damage one generation does to the next.' Sunday Times 'The story of the three Lamberts is as cruel and horrifying as any Greek tragedy. What it may lack in grandeur it makes up for in being true and recent. Its portrayal of the way in which the Lamberts instinctively yet unintentionally assisted in the destruction of their own offspring makes for truly compulsive reading.' Harpers and Queen