Most Popular Books by Andrew Motion

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

"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 UK shores and the bounds of his laureateship, 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 Andrew Motion throughout his writing life. In the first part he tells the story of his mother''s riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second he remembers the end of his father''s much longer life; in the third he describes an encounter that deepens the poem''s tangled themes of loss and memory and retrieval. Although the prevailing mood of the poem has a Tennysonian sweep and melancholy, its wealth of vivid physical details and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are impossible." --Publisher.

Julio de 1802. En las marismas de la orilla oriental del Támesis se levanta La Hispaniola, la posada de Jim Hawkins y su hijo. El joven Jim se pasa los días vagando por el estuario envuelto en la bruma, haciendo recados para su padre y escuchando sus relatos en la bodega: historias de aventuras en alta mar, de maldiciones, asesinatos y venganzas, un tesoro enterrado... y de un hombre con una pata de palo. Una noche, una joven misteriosa llamada Natty llega con una petición para Jim de su padre, John Silver el Largo. Envejecido y débil, pero conservando todavía una extraña fuerza, el pirata propone que Jim y Natty zarpen hacia la isla del tesoro en busca de la fortuna oculta del capitán Flint. A tal propósito, Silver ya ha fletado un barco y ha contratado a una curtida tripulación, cuyo capitán sólo espera el mapa, que permanece guardado bajo llave en La Hispaniola. A toda prisa, huyendo de Londres, Jim y Natty parten tras los pasos de sus padres, y su vacilante amistad va estrechándose día tras día. Pero la emoción de la odisea en el océano deja paso al terror cuando el Nightingale llega a su destino porque parece que la isla del tesoro no está tan deshabitada como en el pasado...

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''.

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.

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."

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.

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

In the Blood is Andrew Motion''s beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England - an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life. It also tells the story of how these worlds are shattered, when his mother suffers a terrible riding accident. The tragedy shadows the book, feeding its mood of elegy as well as its celebratory vigilance. Written from a teenage child''s point of view, without the benefit of adult hindsight, Motion captures the pathos and puzzlement of childhood with great clarity of expression and freshness of memory. We encounter a strange but beguiling extended family, a profound love of the natural world, a troubled schooling, and a growing passion for books and writing. By turns funny and elegiac, In the Blood is a wonderful picture of a vanishing England, a remarkable insight into a poet''s mind, and a deeply moving portrait of the bond between a mother and her son.

"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.