A mixed bag of a book, but worth having for the good bits.
Sir Andrew Motion needs little introduction. He is probably best known for having been Britain’s poet laureate from 1999 to 2009, though even without this achievement, he would still be an important name. He founded The Poetry Archive, a wonderful resource for discovering English poetry, modern and classic, in an accessible and attractive way. (I learned much from it myself ‘in my younger and more vulnerable days’.)
He has also written biographies of such important poets as Larkin and Keats. All this makes him something of a cultural and generational touchstone in the poetry world (if a quiet and unassuming one), and his Homewood Professorship of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University ensures that a new generation will be imbibing his influence.
But should they? Amidst this glitteringly successful career—one which puts many poet-asters to shame—his actual poetic writing seems, oddly, to be the quietest part of his working life. I was glad, then, to see this smart collection from Faber and finally to have a good opportunity to get a handle on Motion’s poetic work.
The collection covers 1977–2022. The first section, which oddly covers 1983–2015, makes for a slow start. There are some ‘long’ (i.e., medium-length) poems—a welcome sight in 2023 when it seems as if every poem is a simple short lyric. (Nothing wrong with these, but it is only a very small part of what poetry can do.) But, for me, many of these resemble prose narratives so much that there is little to distinguish them as poems rather than, say, flash fiction.
Motion himself has said that his poems—particularly this type—are ‘meditative’; and I see that, though the use of foul language, for this reader, detracts dreadfully from that aspiration. I would have expected something statelier from the former laureate.
The subjects, at this stage, are often personal, and tragic—the deaths of his parents come back often in the book’s two-hundred-or-so pages—and while I wouldn’t begrudge anyone working through such things in this way (writing is the greatest of therapies), I found, as I went on through the book, that the poems were often more successful the less personal and specific they became.
There is no great surprise in this. We have thousands of years of poetry to learn from, and the grand and general has often been more successful than the highly specific and personal.
All this might incline one to suppose that Motion’s gifts were always, in the end, better suited to prose, which can be highly personal and highly effective at the same time (think of almost any modern novel!); and it is an area in which he has had great success. But, as one goes on, one meets with many a poem that I would term genuinely ‘intriguing’. And one encounters, also, experiments with form: everything is represented here, from highly fragmented free verse to pretty strict sonnets.
One starts to get the sense that Motion, though perhaps not a great poet in the way of Dante or Shakespeare, is more like a supporter of poetry—an evangelist, an experimenter, an explorer. The poems are often quite searching both in character and style, like those of a poetic way-finder attempting to chart new territory.
The best poems are in the last hundred pages—dating from 2002–2022. Does Motion get better with age? Possibly. It’s hard to tell from a ‘Selected’ rather than a ‘Collected’ poems, and the last twenty pages or so (the most recent lyrics) really seem nothing very special. But there are some very intriguing and some very good things elsewhere in this last long section.
It is hard to quote a line or two, or ten, from Motion because his style is so tied to development over a larger area—even in his shortest poems. But to give an idea of his most compressed style, I quote perhaps the briefest poem in the book, ‘The Cinder Path’:
I know what it means
to choose the cinder path.
You might say death
but I prefer taking
pains with the world.
The signpost ahead
which bears no inscription.
The elm tree enduring
the terrible heat
of its oily green flame.
It is enigmatic, of course—even to the point of seeming somewhat unfinished—and I will resist the temptation to stamp any one interpretation on it. The point is to give an idea of the character of the few short lyrics in the book.
The most evocative and searching of the long poems is ‘Juliet’. It’s a long narrative about a—perhaps fictional?—old flame. Here are a few lines:
The church Victorian Doomsday
moored to the hilltop
with its pretty flotilla of graves.
The weathervane cockerel’s gold and flying eye.
[…]
in the maze of a slow song
she lays her long bare arms on his shoulders
allowing him to breathe
the sleepy vanilla scent in the crease of her elbows
linking her fingers behind his neck
resting her head on his forehead
her black hair
her skin sealed to his skin
as if her thoughts could flood him
with the perfect blank of superior happiness.
It is at once very imagistic and very scenic and specific. Really, as it happens, the above passage is quite representative of Motion in general. As T. S. Eliot said of Ben Jonson, one would be hard pressed to point to a single line and say that it is great poetry, but the overall effect, in the more successful pieces, is involving and charming.
There are a lot of long poems towards the end of the book. Again, it is good to see, and I applaud the effort, but an intrinsic difficulty in the long poem is that of sustaining quality over what, for an intense, condensed art like poetry, is a large number of words and lines, resulting in very mixed quality, from which the book never truly escapes for much more than a page at a time.
As suggested already, there are few immortal, or even quotable lines in Motion’s New and Selected. I don’t want to pick on this poet in particular; I am fond of him and I admire him. But I wonder if such unquotable, self-conscious, almost embarrassed poetry as we see nowadays has contributed to poetry’s current rather poor public image: it seems now like a recondite art for a very few appassionati when historically it has been the enjoyment, joy, and spiritual nourishment of many.
Thank you as always for reading The Modena Review!
If willing and able, do feel free to make a one-time donation towards the costs of running MR.
Andrew Motion was recently at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds with his band LYR. Sadly I was not able to go to the gig but was told it was great.