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Essex Clay
In this verse memoir Andrew Motion recalls the experiences that have influenced his life and his mother’s riding accident and lingering death, his widowed father’s dementia, and an unexpected meeting with an old love.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
176 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
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About the author
Andrew Motion
113 books63 followersSir 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
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July 18, 2022Anyway thought I'd worm my way in here -- it's tempting (and glib) to say unlike Motion it's moving. At least at times. He's being more formally experimental here than we're used to from him though I'm in two minds about it - it feels a little like he's looking at the way younger (sorry Andrew) poets such as Ocean Vuong stereotypically use form and working out if he can incorporate it though the result does seem to me that OV is much more a natural of it.
Also this leads to the melodramatic isolation of words which seems more cliché than punch. All the same there are some well-wrung phrases in here I don't mean to say there's nothing of worth - though it feels odd (in a sense) from a poet laureate. What I'm saying is that he produces some great lines because, I think, of his training & his ear for a line but this can fail him at crucial moments, it seems when he's looking to ape a form not his own. That's not to say I want AM to run back to cosy quatrains - I prefer this for him. It just has some inbetweeny moments. Hm
Also this leads to the melodramatic isolation of words which seems more cliché than punch. All the same there are some well-wrung phrases in here I don't mean to say there's nothing of worth - though it feels odd (in a sense) from a poet laureate. What I'm saying is that he produces some great lines because, I think, of his training & his ear for a line but this can fail him at crucial moments, it seems when he's looking to ape a form not his own. That's not to say I want AM to run back to cosy quatrains - I prefer this for him. It just has some inbetweeny moments. Hm
October 11, 2022
Essex Clay by Andrew Motion
Book 43/52
Favourite quote: “He sees her / Not herself.”
An entire book read before midday!!!!
To be fair it is all in prose. This one really threw me not gonna lie - it is literally set about fifteen minutes from me. I don’t really have any words other than I am very sad.
Book 43/52
Favourite quote: “He sees her / Not herself.”
An entire book read before midday!!!!
To be fair it is all in prose. This one really threw me not gonna lie - it is literally set about fifteen minutes from me. I don’t really have any words other than I am very sad.
May 10, 2022
Some heart felt poetry around the deaths of the authors parents, if you have a similar lost it does provide a mirror for your onwn feelings, an engaging piece of work.
September 15, 2023
‘ … ice ticks faintly as it tightens on a puddle under the hawthorn.’
I've read a few books on grief recently: Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Crow, The Carrying. This three-part book, in the form of a prose poem, finds an adolescent son coping with the death of his parents decades apart and a surprise reunion with an ex-girlfriend:
‘Grief / too little a word / no spring-lock inside it / primed / to snap back to its opposite / the second her eyes open / again.’
It’s deftly handled, always with a fine balance: prose and poetry, directness or lyricism, the son’s confusion and understanding, practical realities and wistful introversion, time that’s focussed then stretched, the heavy stodgy countryside of Essex clay and the bright antiseptic wards:
‘ … where everyone who lives there / begs her to stay / and everyone looking on / from the far horizons of her hospital bedside / begs her to leave.’
And after all that, the final shock of a reunion after 40 years.
‘If he had ever / and he had / he sees that now / in corn-yellow soft focus / If he had ever imagined they might / Then / shame on him … ‘
The three parts become geometrically shorter but one senses again this is finely balanced as we bound into the present from distant memories.
While Crow hammered home the injustice of sorrow, and Grief is the Thing With Feathers was a graceful, unique discourse about the possibilities of handling grief, Essex Clay allows quiet contemplation of the narrator’s panoply of contradictory feelings: bizarre, understandable, maudlin, maundering, mature and incisive. It’s mostly very focused. Largely the narrator understands, is mature and incisive, yet on the occasions such sentiments fail him, his bizarre, maudlin, maundering thoughts are put to the reader with a brevity and freshness that belies either their weightiness or his confusion.
‘… the Ashground / where he tries to avoid remembering / thousands of bluebell bulbs / hoarding their extravagant and ravishing colour tide / under a camouflage of wet leaves.’
No crow? There was sure to be a cawing in the distant wood past the claggy earth; the writing has that detached, distant feel about it, as it stumbles from one incisive thought to another of inapplicability and back again, the narrator’s mind rambling instinctively as it struggles to accept his mother and father’s fallibility and then his ex-girlfriend’s vulnerability. Yet, one senses this is a young man who will be in control of his life.
‘He dreams up / a superbly powerful blade / say the scimitar / Boudicca forged onto her chariot wheel / hacking down perfectly easily / without the least tremor of resistance / every Roman soldier track-side telegraph pole.’
It's been a serendipitous conjunction of reading about grief. I'd recommend all four highly.
I've read a few books on grief recently: Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Crow, The Carrying. This three-part book, in the form of a prose poem, finds an adolescent son coping with the death of his parents decades apart and a surprise reunion with an ex-girlfriend:
‘Grief / too little a word / no spring-lock inside it / primed / to snap back to its opposite / the second her eyes open / again.’
It’s deftly handled, always with a fine balance: prose and poetry, directness or lyricism, the son’s confusion and understanding, practical realities and wistful introversion, time that’s focussed then stretched, the heavy stodgy countryside of Essex clay and the bright antiseptic wards:
‘ … where everyone who lives there / begs her to stay / and everyone looking on / from the far horizons of her hospital bedside / begs her to leave.’
And after all that, the final shock of a reunion after 40 years.
‘If he had ever / and he had / he sees that now / in corn-yellow soft focus / If he had ever imagined they might / Then / shame on him … ‘
The three parts become geometrically shorter but one senses again this is finely balanced as we bound into the present from distant memories.
While Crow hammered home the injustice of sorrow, and Grief is the Thing With Feathers was a graceful, unique discourse about the possibilities of handling grief, Essex Clay allows quiet contemplation of the narrator’s panoply of contradictory feelings: bizarre, understandable, maudlin, maundering, mature and incisive. It’s mostly very focused. Largely the narrator understands, is mature and incisive, yet on the occasions such sentiments fail him, his bizarre, maudlin, maundering thoughts are put to the reader with a brevity and freshness that belies either their weightiness or his confusion.
‘… the Ashground / where he tries to avoid remembering / thousands of bluebell bulbs / hoarding their extravagant and ravishing colour tide / under a camouflage of wet leaves.’
No crow? There was sure to be a cawing in the distant wood past the claggy earth; the writing has that detached, distant feel about it, as it stumbles from one incisive thought to another of inapplicability and back again, the narrator’s mind rambling instinctively as it struggles to accept his mother and father’s fallibility and then his ex-girlfriend’s vulnerability. Yet, one senses this is a young man who will be in control of his life.
‘He dreams up / a superbly powerful blade / say the scimitar / Boudicca forged onto her chariot wheel / hacking down perfectly easily / without the least tremor of resistance / every Roman soldier track-side telegraph pole.’
It's been a serendipitous conjunction of reading about grief. I'd recommend all four highly.
August 2, 2018
I originally thought this was prose but found it was poetry. Having read Motion's excellent In The Blood autobiography about his upbringing, I thought this was a continuation of that and in a way it is, but it is written in verse and in snapshots. The book is divided into three parts, the first is a poem dealing with the accident and protracted death of his mother, a harrowing incident which he also described in his previous memoir. The second part is a poem about the death of his father many years later. The final piece of the book is a poem that in some ways comes full circle and is about an encounter he has with someone from his past. As I'm from the same area as Andrew, he often mentions things that I can recognise and relate to in some way, for instance, the title 'Essex Clay,' itself is a substance I'm very familiar with. Overall, a powerfully produced book.
July 25, 2021
I always hope for a new anthology to be profound but often this means savouring a handful of lines or phrases scattered across a mixed bag of poems. Not so here. There are many beautifully composed lines and whole sections to savour as flavours catch the attention, diffuse and deepen. But Andrew Motion has created an entity across three parts that seems to be a sharing of my own youth at times, and elsewhere so convincing in resonance and observation that it must be something I had forgotten. Wonderful.
June 30, 2023
i like this one as soon as i had my hands on it, after right purchasing it, but as i turned the pages the words seem more of a novel than a three-part poem, which is about grief. the plot is great, the language is great, and i like it, but the poet laureate himself seems to forget that poems have to be something more than that…and so it’s what it is.
June 14, 2025
A stunning long poem on the theme of grief, trauma, and final resolutions. Motion is able to recount incredibly specific details of events in such a way that brings you straight into his distinct perspective. This when added with his profound poetic style creates a masterpiece that must be experienced.
A poem to be read again and again.
A poem to be read again and again.
September 16, 2018
‘His invincible father.
When he leaves
He slips clean
Through the washstand mirror
His invincible father.’
When he leaves
He slips clean
Through the washstand mirror
His invincible father.’
March 3, 2019
Not bad but just not for me.
November 16, 2023
A random pick.in the library. Beautifully explored impact of accidents and grief
January 15, 2025
“He has decided to anchor / everything that remains / in the continual stillness of remembering.” A stunning long poem on grief, memory and recovery.
June 17, 2025
floored
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews