Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet whose work often engages with current events and societal themes. During his tenure as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, he was known for his efforts to make poetry accessible to a wider audience, exemplified by initiatives such as the Poetry Archive, an online library of poets' recordings. His style is characterized by its ability to reflect everyday life while addressing pressing social issues, leaving a significant impact on readers.
Blending scholarly insight with a vibrant flair, this anthology offers a profound exploration of literature's emotional impact. It presents a collection that is both fascinating and essential, showcasing a diverse range of voices and perspectives. The book serves as a significant educational experience, inviting readers to engage deeply with its themes and narratives.
From an extraordinary poetic career and including new and previously uncollected poems, this selection draws together work that in a variety of ways offers intimate reflections on memory and the cost of human experience.
Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of a continuous poetic tradition which stretches back beyond the time of Virgil and Horace to Ancient Greece, speaking eloquently and movingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. In perhaps the purest instance of art's fundamental 'impulse to preserve' (Philip Larkin), it gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate for long, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp.In The Penguin Book of Elegy , Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, selecting the best and most significant poems and poets from the Classical roots of elegy, and from its Renaissance revival down to the present day. They show how this remarkably resilient and versatile form has continued to adapt itself even as society and religious belief have shifted around it, with striking achievements in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets as different as Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Denise Riley and Gwendolyn Brooks.The result is the only comprehensive anthology of its kind now available in the English language. The Penguin Book of Elegy is itself a work of preservation - and a profound and moving catalogue of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and give comfort to those who survive them.
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.
Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration and current British and American politics.
Public Property was Andrew Motion's first collection of poetry after being appointed Poet Laureate. The final section of the book contains a number of elegies and love poems, written in a variety of lyric forms, which provoke concerns that are among the most critical in poetry: What is public art?
From the Orford Merman of the title poem, to an elegy written for a friend who died on the Marchioness, to the vivid prose meditation of the second part, written when Andrew Motion retraced the voyage that John Keats made by sea from London to Naples in the autumn of 1820, the book insistently and brilliantly elaborates images of water.
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 and a hymn to familial love.
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.
