This selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself from three decades of
work, is an outstanding representation of the British poet's varied body
of work--elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation,
and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, the natural
world.
About his poetry, Motion has observed: "I want my writing to be as clear
as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to
be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I
want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which
turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they
realized. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation
than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling,
and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I
most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin."
A significant and consistent feature of Motion's work, throughout his
shifts in style and changes in imaginative topographies, is his
signature clarity of observation, his unwillingness to sacrifice
intelligibility or embrace opacity. "The best poems," Motion has said,
"are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in
a way that we never forget."
