Love in a Life

by Andrew Motion

First edition, first printing hardcover with unclipped dust jacket in very good condition. Inside jacket edges are slightly marked and creased. Mimimal spots of foxing on the pastedowns and endpapers. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2011

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]

There’s some really great work in here. Andrew Motion takes those ordinary, everyday things like love, tragedy and loss, and expresses them in such a way that it reminds you of how they really feel; how life really feels.

Motion does to life what stained glass does to light.

Look

I pull back the curtain
and what do I see
but my wife on a sheet
and the screen beside her
showing our twins
out of their capsule
in mooning blue,
their dawdler’s legs
kicking through silence
enormously slowly,
while blotches beneath them
revolve like the earth
which will bring them to grief
or into their own.

I pull back the curtain
and what do I see
but my mother asleep,
or at least not awake,
and the sheet folded down
to show me her throat
with its wrinkled hole
and the tube inside
which leads to oxygen
stashed around her bed,
as though any day now
she might lift into space
and never return
to breathe our air.

I pull back the curtain
and what do I see
but the stars in the sky,
and their jittery light
stabbing through heaven
jabs me awake
from my dream that time
will last long enough
to let me die happy,
not yearning for more
like a man lost in space
might howl for the earth
or a dog for the moon
with no reason at all.

[gracie rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

only andrew motion could write a poem about the shit of a retired whippet and it be beautiful

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love in a Life dates from 1999, before Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate. It's a curious mix of straightforward narrative poems and other more complex forms. To my mind, the best poems in the book are One Who Disappeared, where the simplest of poetic forms carries a highly emotional charge, and the intensely moving Hull, which evokes the spirit of both the place and its most famous poetic force, Philip Larkin. In a book of many moods, where most of the poems are about personal relationships in one guise or another, Andrew Motion also surprises the reader with the only poem I have ever read about dog-fouling (It is an Offence) a subject hitherto seldom, if ever, to be treated seriously as poetic subject matter!

[erris · Rating 3 out of 5]

this started out really strong and went downhill. he could rhyme more? his poems are too long and his stanzas are too short for me

its love. its love in a life. i dont know how you theme a poetry book. ideally there wouldnt be a theme except time. love in a life. love in a life. i suppose it was love in a life. everything is love. love is sadness and death and it is love because it is worth those things.

fave poems: Bad Dreams, Look, Close

[Ed KC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some fine poems in this collection. The title is borrowed from Robert Browning's poem and there is a sense that the poet is searching out, and reflecting on, moments of love in his own life, in particular with his first and second (then current) wife. The poems deal with the precariousness of life and the fragility of love, not only that of spouses and lovers, but also of parents, children and friends. Ephemeral moments are grasped at: beginnings, endings and turning points; objects resonate and trigger memories of fleeting moments.

[Gareth Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever and eccentric but not a collection that I clicked with. i think I shall have to read ot again before govong a final verdict. i shall post another review when I do.