Description
Book SynopsisThis selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself from three decades of work, is an outstanding representation of the British poet’s varied body of work—elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation, and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, the natural world. About his poetry, Motion has observed: “I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they’re in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realized. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it’s this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin.” A significant and consistent feature of Motion’s work, throughout his shifts in style and changes in imaginative topographies, is his signature clarity of observation, his unwillingness to sacrifice intelligibility or embrace opacity. “The best poems,” Motion has said, “are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget.”
Trade Review“Motion is a beautiful lyricist, unpretentiously and precisely describing those things worth having even as he casts unsettling shadows across them.”—Guardian
“Motion’s greatest and most distinctive gift . . . is to look squarely at the world and describe it with a plain and unsentimental eloquence that makes worldly value seem all the more questionable.”—Independent
“The Mower vividly demonstrates Andrew Motion’s illuminating discovery of his own voice and his gift of voice to both his father’s generation and today’s, a gift that renders this collection worthy of perusal.”—World Literature Today
