Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence – where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion – to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nation’s character.

Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motion’s formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role.

By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motion’s contention that the poems we most enjoy ‘are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life’s daily bread’.

Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence – where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion – to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nation’s character.

Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motion’s formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role.

By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motion’s contention that the poems we most enjoy ‘are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life’s daily bread’.

From the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, In the Blood is an unforgettable evocation of family, school and country life. By turns funny, heartbreaking and elegiac, it is also a deeply affectionate portrait of the bond between mother and son.

‘Brilliantly achieved and novel-like . . . Vivid and poignant.’ Guardian
‘The most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read.’ Independent on Sunday
‘Deeply engaging. The innocence and the hardness of childhood are beautifully put together . . . A strikingly good book, framed by tragedy but full of intense life.’ Helen Dunmore
‘Every word, sentence and chapter, one drinks down with a joy because it is so artfully and beautifully composed.’ Irish Times

Andrew Motion’s expansive new poetry collection is direct in its emotional appeal, ambitious in its scope, all the while retaining the cinematic vision and startling expression that so freshly lit the lines of his last, Essex Clay.

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 sensibilities that keep us most alive and engaged with the present.

‘Andrew Motion is one of the essential English poets of our time.’ John Burnside

‘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.’ Bernard O’Donoghue, Independent on Sunday

Poetry by Heart is an essential collection of over 200 poems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Emily Dickinson, from Christina Rossetti to Benjamin Zephaniah, all carefully chosen for their suitability for learning and reciting. This is an anthology which celebrates the age-old pleasure of reciting poems – an anthology for all ages to treasure.