Public Property

by Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion's new collection moves between private and public realms. In a series of elegiac idylls he conjures expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood - and reconsiders moments of the Victorian past. There are poems for vanished friends and public figures alike, provoking that most sensitive of what should we make public, what should be made public of us?

Genres: Poetry, British Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who presided as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.

Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent. The Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney had ruled himself out for the post. Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years. The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack.

He wanted to write "poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life," rather than be seen a 'courtier'. So, he wrote "for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle I've finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies." In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict, and in 2005, Spring Wedding in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. Commissioned to write in the honour of 109 year old Harry Patch, the last surviving 'Tommy' to have fought in World War I, Motion composed a five part poem, read and received by Patch at the Bishop's Palace in Wells in 2008. As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.

Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been "very, very damaging to [his] work". The appointment of Motion met with criticism from some quarters. As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian which concluded, "To have had 10 years working as laureate has been remarkable. Sometimes it's been remarkably difficult, the laureate has to take a lot of flak, one way or another. More often it has been remarkably fulfilling. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I'm giving it up – especially since I mean to continue working for poetry." Motion spent his last day as Poet Laureate holding a creative writing class at his alma mater, Radley College, before giving a poetry reading and thanking Peter Way, the man who taught him English at Radley, for making him who he was. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009.

Andrew Motion nació en 1952. Estudió en el University College de Oxford y empezó su carrera enseñando inglés en la Universidad de Hull. También ha sido director de Poetry Review, director editorial de Chatto & Windus, y Poeta Laureado; asimismo, fue cofundador del Poetry Archive, y en 2009 se le concedió el título de Sir por su obra literaria. En la actualidad es profesor de escritura creativa en el Royal Holloway, de la Universidad de Londres. Es miembro de la Royal Society of Literature y vive en Londres. Con un elenco de nobles marineros y crueles piratas, y llena de historias de amor y de valentía, Regreso a la isla del tesoro es una trepidante continuación de La isla del tesoro, escrita con extraordinaria autenticidad y fuerza imaginativa por uno de los grandes escritores ingleses actuales.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another sterling collection of poetry from Andrew Motion. This one was his first collection after becoming Poet Laureate and the two poems about the royals are my least favourite in this book. The rest of it more than makes up for it, though.

The Game

I must tell you this:
there was a boy - Tommy Prentice.
The afternoon I'm thinking about
he stopped me with his shout
of just my first name,
all friendly-like - no blame,
jealously, resentment or distrust -
telling me I must
come out with him now
and play - he had friends waiting, although
it was just me they wanted: without me
the game was no good. OK?
Of course OK. Tommy Prentice
was tall, handsome, cool, use-
ful at fly-half, with slick black hair
fringing his level stare.
And he wanted me? Like I say,
of course it was OK.

We found his friends
where the real garden ends,
or ended, rather, and the wild
began - wild as in where a child
might imagine the worse to lie
hidden in tall grass, in the poked-about eye
of a pond, in the fuzzy shade
a colossal cedar tree made
as it brooded above everything,
its green stratospheres tuned to sing
a thing sphere-music which never ends.

Back to those friends.
I cannot get clear
their names, height, number etc here -
only that none of them gave a sign,
not so much as one single frown
between them, of what was in store -
though maybe that had more
to do with accident than plan.
Maybe (I'm sure if once he began
to explain, Tommy Prentice
would end up saying this)
it was my fault not theirs,
for being lippy, or having fair hair,
or somehow egging them on.

Neither can I say how the game began.
One minute we were standing around
glopping cones into that dead pond,
the next in was World War Two,
the Far East, I was a POW,
and they were the Japanese.
Ridiculous, everyone agrees,
if ever I tell them. Funny, even.
But for a child raise on the idea of heaven
and God firmly installed there...
You get the idea.
After that it was a rope and me
lashed to the cedar tree,
the puzzled bark (like elephant skin close
up) creasing my face,
my dungaree top yanked to my waist,
and my back bare lest
the Japanese, who now saw
a good chance of winning the war,
found it hard
to get at me under the guard
of thin air with their bamboo canes -
though since they did so again
and again, I should have said
difficulty was not something they had
much on their minds - certainly less
than I did, what with the mess
of blood starting to flip over
such clothes I still had as cover,
what with the tree
bark's now all-consuming (to me)
fascination: the pale fawn skin,
the parched cracks leading the eye in-
side to soft and spice-scented darker wood,
and beyond that the sense I had
of pure blackness, where I might fall
out of myself entirely if I let go at all.

How long did that last?
All I can say is: it went past -
though having stepped so far out
(I mean in) to their work, they were not about
to make it seem like a mistake,
these boys, not something they might take
back, or think I didn't deserve.
They even held their nerve
when a teacher sauntered by,
a man who, noticing the tableau
(six or so boys with canes
and one half-undressed, in pain)
called out 'Everyone there fine?'
and made do with 'Right as rain,
Sir. Right as rain'
before he surged quietly away,
thick, rubber-soled shoes making hay
with the grass he trampled as he went.

That's when I understood what it meant
to be as I had become:
dumb-
struck, my voice whipped down the scale
from speech to whisper, to whimper, to wail,
to nothing, as my spirit also sank
away from human into the frank
dependency of a creature
on more powerful natures.
When they eventually let me go
I still did not know
what to say except 'Thank you' -
a mumble, admittedly, but 'Thank you'
all the same -
leaving Tommy Prentice to some new game
under the impassive cedar tree,
tugging the top of my dungarees
gingerly up, my face bearing the mark
of corrugated bark -
fading, but still deep,
as if I had just woken from sleep.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Motion has excellent control of language in this collection of poems—but sometimes, it feels TOO controlled, particularly in the poems about difficult, loaded subjects (abuse, death, etc.).

[Gavin Lightfoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartfelt poetry, l love the way his endings plunge you into thought.

[Fin Quinlan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a big fan.
I love Philip larkin and as his biographer I expected the poetry to be a similar light.
Unfortunately it was all quite 1 dimensional and boring with very little humour or depth involved.

[Shelly Dennison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always want to like Andrew Motion's work more than I do. I really like some of the childhood poems and those that seemed more autobiographical but much of the rest left me unconvinced.