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.
I
At the iron lodge-gates I melt for the first time, leaving rust unstirred, dew gripping a slack chain.
This is the drive I remember – a formal line through beech and open ground where horses graze as ever. So what if I
float close? What if then I touch one drinking? Slow and whiskery the warm head looms towards me, seeing
nothing but a rim of moss around the water-butt, trees, and...
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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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;...
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...
‘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...
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: ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
‘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...
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...
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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