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.
Red brick on red brick.
A boiled eye in a greenhouse.
Lilac smoking in sere gutters and crevices.
A pigtailed head on lamp-post after lamp-post.
*
We had taken my mother’s estate and driven into the blue – she was in hospital then, and didn’t care.
*
Out of nowhere, nowhere else to go, stuck in the parched afternoon, collapsed,
the...
You existed for months as an echo bouncing off darkness and silence, then changed yourself at a glance
to the delicate bones of a kipper dandled to and fro in the waves of a sunless ocean
before shouldering into the world with a crown blobbed like a bird’s egg and indigo stampers’ feet
but nothing about you a fragment more or less than perfect, even though putting...
R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits. Our expectations are raised still further by discovering that ‘some years before her death’ Edward Thomas’s ‘widow Helen gave her friend George Thomas open access to all her papers which included some eighteen hundred letters’. Here at last, we are made to think, is the definitive account of one of the century’s most important writers: important for his intrinsic qualities, and because his work illuminates the motives of the first great Modernists, as well as the treatment they have received from subsequent generations of English poets. Anyone contemplating the life of Edward Thomas has the chance to tell a human story of great fascination and poignancy, and simultaneously to characterise a literary climate which profoundly affects our own. Edward Thomas was a man in whom an enormous number of conflicting compulsions – personal as well as artistic – met, were recognised, and were robed as destinies.’
You knew you were lucky, born all of a piece and born into peace. So why were you seeing your father off from the flagstone step wearing your sweet little cowboy suit – distressed leather chaps with grubby fringes – and him in his real, steely-pressed uniform?
Once in a while he would take you: Daimler sickness swaying to Salisbury Plain, and a rainy weekend of firing – a...
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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