Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion’s most recent book of poems is The Customs House. ‘The Discoveries of Geography’ owes a thank you to A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton.

Poem: ‘These Days’

Andrew Motion, 5 April 1984

It might be any night these days, when every night is like nothing on earth. Tired with drinking, we long

for your riotous children to wear themselves out and shamble off to their beds.Make it be soon, my eyes say

rolling up to the ceiling – a relished, leisurely roll which tells you as wellI want you. Bowing low

so your forehead rests on the rumpled tablecloth just for a second, you...

Poem: ‘Coming to Visit’

Andrew Motion, 6 October 1983

Your daughter Kate saw the ghost the same summer night your twin came for her visit. I had been happy, before, always to leave my place in your bed for the twin to take it, but this time something was wrong.

In the spare-room, staring down at the single acacia and beech which suddenly loomed like a wood, I was willing the close-set leaves to obscure me, to let me be lost to the world and...

Two Poems

Andrew Motion, 18 November 1982

Open Secrets

‘The first time father erupted that day was at Florrie rolling the dustbins downhill to their emptying-pit. From the upstairs landing I saw him arms crossed with his dressing-gown’s dark green paisley swirled in the wind, and Florrie scarlet, still half-swiveled round to the litter as if it surprised her, tattering out in a trail of scrumpled tissues and newspapers...

Poem: ‘Resident at the Club’

Andrew Motion, 4 March 1982

Once there was Grayzo and me, now there is only me. By twelve, when servants have closed the bar and gone wherever they go to sleep, the Club is my own. I am drunk

as usual tonight, weaving my way to bed through the hushed saloon with its ropes of cigarette smoke, then out to the balcony steps. It was here that Grayzo stopped me,

using his pompous ironical voice:Permit me to show you the...

Poem: ‘The First of Things’

Andrew Motion, 2 April 1981

I

Almost time, and the sun at last round to her open classroom door. A dusty glowing bar tipped across desk-tops, paper, heads

and basking her face and hair. She lets it dazzle a moment, arms folded, one shoe eased half-off, and the room dissolves.

No drawing lesson. No children. No maps pinned low on the walls. No names. Just brilliant crude light

swimming with flecks of chalk – the...

Kids Gone Rotten: ‘Treasure Island’

Matthew Bevis, 25 October 2012

John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the...

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This memoir takes its title and its epigraph from Wordsworth: I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart. The poet laureate thus...

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The Eng. Lit. Patient: Andrew Motion

Jeremy Noel-Tod, 11 September 2003

John Keats John Keats John Please put your scarf on. The author of these lines is J.D. Salinger’s fictional child-poet, Seymour Glass, showing a precocious acquaintance with literary...

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Inspiration, Accident, Genius

Helen Vendler, 16 October 1997

In the sixties, three scholarly biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful;...

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Lawful Charm

Donald Davie, 6 July 1995

Barnes’s poems prompt no new questions about poetry, and no new convictions about it. The hoariest truths about poetry will always be new and questionable to some people, especially those...

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Alas! Deceived: Philip Larkin

Alan Bennett, 25 March 1993

‘My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had...

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Rites of Passage

Anthony Quinn, 27 June 1991

Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night: ...

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Seeing yourself dead

Nicolas Tredell, 21 February 1991

Marriage, mortality, memory, the onset of middle age and the pressure of children criss-cross Andrew Motion’s latest collection. Should we treat the vivid images and incidents that comprise...

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Sunlight

Philip Horne, 28 September 1989

In 1982, at the age of 30, Andrew Motion, together with Blake Morrison, claimed attention in the Introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry for the idea that ‘British...

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Broadening Ocean

Brad Leithauser, 3 March 1988

Two poets, writing in nearly the same language (British English, American English) and born at nearly the same time (1952, 1951). One, Andrew Motion, is quite well-known in this country, though...

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Tales of Hofmann

Blake Morrison, 20 November 1986

The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth...

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We were the Lambert boys

Paul Driver, 22 May 1986

Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens...

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Venisti tandem

Denis Donoghue, 7 February 1985

A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art...

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Making sense

Denis Donoghue, 4 October 1984

In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but...

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The Last Romantic

John Bayley, 5 May 1983

Transfiguration is into a kind of poetic absence which includes only the idea of love, not its quotidian betrayals or fulfilments. ‘What remains of us is love’ in the sense that love equates with self-extinction....

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Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...

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Kelpers

Claude Rawson, 17 June 1982

The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament is about a local institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any...

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Thomas’s Four Hats

Patricia Beer, 2 April 1981

The publishers say that The Poetry of Edward Thomas is the first full-length study to deal exclusively with Thomas’s poetry (in Britain, they must mean). On the face of it, a six-decade gap...

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