In his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In the opening series of idylls he conjures the expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood, in scenes as precisely remembered as they are irretrievable. Elsewhere he reconsiders moments from the Victorian past from reticent and surprising angles, and elsewhere again he tackles distinctly contemporary themes and situations. 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? To whom do our most private sentiments belong?
Public Property
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'A book that anyone who enjoys poetry will find moving and rewarding' Sunday Times
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Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion's novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) was described as 'amazingly clever' by the Irish Times and praised for 'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' by the Sunday Telegraph. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read' in the Independent on Sunday. His most recent collection of poems, The Cinder Path (2009), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009.
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Andrew Motion (Poet Laureate) and Simon Armitage (Millenium Dome poet, numerous other grant-funded operations) are perhaps the two most publicly owned of English Poets - both poets ostensibly making their living by being poets, and most interestingly, poets in the public eye. At one time it might have seemed odd to compare them - odd to me anyway - but as the years have passed similarities in their strategies to being a poet have emerged. Anyone who has recently heard these poets perform might understand what I mean better. They can draw an audience from outside the poetry world. You usually know what you are going to get and if you like that sort of thing you usuaally leave satisfied. They are not poets to turn their own approaches upside down or re-invent themselves radically between collections. They have found a formula - quite a conservative one - and they stick to it. They make the right noises and they seldon upset anyone. More and more, however, I am convinced that Motion is in fact the less predictable, which has been a rare surprise for me. There are narrative poems in Public Property that walk further towards uncertain and dark territory than anything in Armitage since Kid. The Game is genuinely and richly disturbing. And there is much less verbal formula too - less of the ticks and tricks of the man playing to the gallery he knows too well. A great deal of this material seems fresh and promises a new seam in Motion's work. A pleasant surprise for me. He's drawn me in.
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