Andrew Motion

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

Keats

Familiar poems and almost unknown poems. Love poems and war poems. Funny poems and heartbroken poems. Poems that re-create the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. Poetry by Heart is an essential collection of over 200 poems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Emily Dickinson, from Christina Rossetti to Benjamin Zephaniah, all carefully chosen for their suitability for learning and reciting. This is an anthology which celebrates the age-old pleasure of reciting poems - an anthology for all ages to treasure.

Poetry by Heart

Since becoming Poet Laureate in 1999, Andrew Motion has been tireless in his efforts to raise the profile of poetry. In this wonderful anthology, he has brought together an extraordinary range of poems, exemplifying his belief that, if we let it, poetry has a unique power to enrich our lives as it diversifies them. The poems are arranged in a series of ten concentric rings: Self, Home, Town, Work, Land, Love, Travel, War, Belief and Space. Each section is distinct but seeks out resemblances and echoes elsewhere, creating the impression of an endlessly expanding universe. From Wallace Stevens to Stevie Smith, Joseph Brodsky to Jo Shapcott, Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas, Ben Jonson to Benjamin Zephaniah, Here to Eternity provides a perfect introduction for new readers and offers surprising connections and revelations to those who are already well-versed.

An Anthology of Poetry

Here to Eternity

A former UK poet laureate's swashbuckling continuation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island is set 20 years later and finds Natty, the daughter of Long John Silver, teaming up with Hawkins' son, Jim, on a dangerous voyage to the legendary island in search of their fathers' hidden treasure.

Return to Treasure Island

Silver

The Pale Companion

John Keats

One of eight wonderful collections, celebrating the best of Romantic poetry - also included in the series is Byron, Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Burns and Keats.

'An exemplary biography of its kind - detailed, meticulous and sympathetic.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary 'Life' of him.' Peter Conrad, Observer'Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion's book could not be bettered.' Alan Bennett, London Review of Books'There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motion's, like Forster's of Dickens, will always have a special place.' John Carey, Sunday Times

A Writer's Life

Philip Larkin

A dazzling and boldly original biography by Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate and the celebrated biographer of Larkin and Keats.Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was an ingenious and unscrupulous criminal.In 1828 he inherited the handsome family home, while successive legacies allowed him to maintain a flamboyant lifestyle. Meanwhile, within the space of a few years, three of his relatives died in suspicious circumstances. Eventually tried and arrested, Wainewright was transported for life to Tasmania. Yet he had lived at the centre of the Romantic world. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and painted Byron's portrait. He was good friends with Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Charles Lamb, and knew John Clare, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey and John Keats. He was known as amiable, kind, and good-hearted. Combining the form of a 'confession' with notes, asides and illuminations, Wainewright the Poisoner strips away the layers of legend and restores Wainewright to his own voice, capturing his dandified style, his charm as well as his callousness, his wit as well as his wantonness - and his deadly unreliability.

Wainewright the Poisoner

John Burnside

André Naffis-Sahely

Timothy Donnelly

Robert Crawford

Jon Stone

Sarah Howe

Helen Mort

Tim Gunn

Paul Muldoon

Andrew Zurcher

Mina Gorji

W. N. Herbert

Isobel Dixon

Alicia Elsbeth Stallings

John McAuliffe

Leontia Flynn

Peter Manson

Andy Powell

Aisha Farr

Anthony Adler

Aviva Dautch

13 Pages

Nonpareil Press

An Anthology of Imitation

The Mimic Octopus

Love in a Life, Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry, marks a conspicuous development in the work of the founder of the modern Narrative School. Directness and a new colloquialism are wedded to Motion's distinctive obliquities in a volume where the idea of marriage governs the architecture of each poem and the book as a whole. The stories of two marriages gradually emerge, like chapters in a narrative, and are themselves bound to more public material, so that each lends profound resonances to the other.

Love in a Life

Examines the life and work of the popular, yet reclusive, twentieth century English poet

First published in 1997, Keats was the first major biography of this tragic hero of Romanticism for some thirty years, and it differs from its predecessors in important respects. The outline of the story is well known - has become, in fact, the stuff of legend: the archetypal life of the tortured genius, critically spurned and dying young. What Andrew Motion brings to bear on the subject is a deep understanding of how Keats fitted into the intellectual and political life of his time. Important friendships with such anti-establishment figures as William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt are given their full due, and the closeness of his own spirit, as expressed in his poems, to the ferment all around is made clear. Many significant facts about Keats's schooldays and medical training, in particular, enrich the picture. Keats emerges as a more political figure than he is usually portrayed, but his personal sufferings, too, come into closer focus. Most importantly, Andrew Motion - himself a distinguished poet and former poet laureate - demonstrates how the poems continue to exert their power. 'A definitive life of a great poet, and one of the finest biographies of the decade.' New Statesman

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life won the Whitbread Award for Biography in 1993 and was championed as 'an exemplary biography of its kind' (The Times). With a new introduction written by the author, this edition offers an engrossing portrait of one of the twentieth century's most popular, and most private, poets. 'There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motion's, like Forster's of Dickens, will always have a special place.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary 'Life' of him.' Peter Conrad, Observer 'Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion's book could not be bettered.' Alan Bennett, London Review of Books

"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.

Essex Clay

The third anthology in the brilliant Bedford Square series features the very best in young British writing. In 2004 Poet Laureate Andrew Motion established a brand new creative writing course at Royal Holloway, University of London. Bedford Square 3 showcases the writers from the Class of 2007—smartly original and refreshingly varied, here are some of the most exciting new voices in contemporary writing.

New Writing from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Programme

Bedford Square 3

Young Jim Hawkins is caught up with the daughter of pirate Long John Silver in search of the buried treasure of the buccaneer Captain Flint.

William Faulkner's character Quentin in The Sound and the Fury repeatedly observes that "temporary" is "the saddest word of all." Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of British Poet Laureate Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A pæan to his family, and the secret hollows of his beloved home, this memoir evokes a whole world long disappeared. The book begins in December of 1968, hours before his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. 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 in the blood, and felt along the heart," is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral substance of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost.

A Memoir of My Childhood

In the Blood

From England’s former Poet Laureate, a collection of selected poetry spanning his celebrated career, presented for the first time by an American publisher, now in paperback Andrew Motion has said, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp." Though the territory of his exploration may be murky and mired—the front lines of war, political entanglements, romantic longing, and human suffering—Motion’s conversational tone and lyrical style make for clear, bold poems that speak to contradictions at the heart of the human condition. Whether underground in an urban metro, in the poet’s home, on the steps leading up to Anne Frank’s annex, or wading in the Norfolk broads, Motion’s richly imagined landscapes contain unspoken mysteries underneath the poet’s candor. In the tradition of English pastoral poetry that includes Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and William Wordsworth, these poems skate over sweeping empires and plumb emotional depths, settling in a meditative, understated register. As an introduction to one of England’s most lauded living poets, English Elegies offers a moving depiction of this writer’s career as a chronicler of modernity’s pitfalls and triumphs.

Selected Poems 1975-2015

Coming in to Land

Written from a teenage child's point of view, 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, heartbreaking and elegiac, In the Blood is a deeply moving portrait of the bond between a mother and her son, and the capturing of a moment in time before the loss of childhood innocence.

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

About

Books

Join the club