This comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motion-s distinguished body of work from Secret Narratives (1983) to his most recent volume, Randomly Moving Particles (2020), and includes a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems.
Certain preoccupations unite the book, which from first to last is particularly concerned with the ways in which our lives are shaped by loss - by wars, by accidents, by the erosion of time and by grief. Motion is an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while his poems mostly develop his themes by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and documentary sources. In every case, and especially movingly in the long poem -Essex Clay-, Motion uses acts of personal witness to reflect the vulnerabilities of the world at large.
These are extraordinary poems of and for our times, enlarging our sense of the cost of human experience even as they refine those sensib
