Best Selling Books by Andrew Motion

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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

London im Sommer 1802, rund 40 Jahre nach den dramatischen Ereignissen auf der Schatzinsel. Jim Hawkins jr. und Natty, die Tochter des geläuterten Piratenkapitäns Long John Silver, sollen im Auftrag ihres Vaters zur Schatzinsel in die Karibik aufbrechen, um den restlichen Silberschatz zu bergen

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

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."

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

"Full of big themes such as courage, greed, loyalty and obsession, "The New World" is still an adventure story first and foremost. . . . An entertaining homage that is deeply felt and sincere." --"The Guardian" (UK) Washed ashore after escaping Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins and his companion Natty find themselves stranded on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Their ship, the "Nightingale," has been destroyed, and besides one other crew member, they are the only survivors. Before they can even grasp the full scope of their predicament, they realize they are not alone on the beach. When a band of Native Americans approaches the shore in a threatening fury, they brutally kill Jim and Natty's last shipmate, rob their dead crew, and take the two desperate survivors hostage. Suddenly, Jim and Natty are thrust into an adventure that takes them all across the unruly American South. Starting with a desperate escape from a violent chief who obsessively keeps close on their trail, they join up with a troupe of entertainers who take them to a thriving and dangerous New Orleans, and seek the closest port so they can set sail for home once again. In magnificent, free-wheeling prose and in a high-flying style, Andrew Motion has spun a fantastic yarn that will win the hearts of adventure lovers everywhere.