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Nov 28, 2024 | 
decine21.com | Andrew Motion |Jane Campion
Amor. Amor apasionado, romántico, espiritual, total, que lleva a tener al amado en la cabeza las 24 horas del día. Donde la distinta sensibilidad no impide el deseo de comunión, y donde lo principal no es consumar el amor físicamente, cuanto antes.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Andrew Motion
Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Nicholas Clee |Andrew Motion |Nat Segnit |disappearanceBy Nicholas Clee
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fifth novel, A Case of Matricide, opens, as did his previous three, with a foreword in which “GMB” gives the background to publication.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Nat Segnit |Andrew Motion |Nicholas Clee |Hal Jensen
Thirteen-year-old Briar and his younger sister Rose are hiding out in an empty house against an unspecified threat. The keys to the house are attached to a see-through plastic keyring containing a photograph of smiling children. Briar wonders if the photograph is of the house’s former occupants, from a time “when there were household goods and things in it making it lived-in”. No, thinks Rose.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Motion
Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island “a Copernican revolution” in studies of the great poet. It’s a big claim, and for the first few dozen pages it looks as though it might be an exaggeration. The book – which combines elements of biography, history and literary criticism, and runs to 750 pages – develops its arguments at a very leisurely pace, and is studded with backward glances and repetitions.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Motion
Christopher Isherwood spent much of the first half of his life writing fiction that was based closely on his own experiences in England and Germany, and much of the second half expanding, revising, and interrogating those original accounts.
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May 20, 2024 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Andrew Motion |Virginia Konchan
By Andrew Motion Andrew Motion’s Waders opens with “Evening Traffic,” a study of witness and perception that introduces a speaker whose mind figures as a sieve for nature and the world. This poem ends with the speaker “composing myself for a night flight,” into sleep:
When I look upward I see schools of fish
in one mind while they change direction,
and sunlight in a dimpled ring as if hands
were washing there, or reaching through.
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Mar 20, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Motion
Maidwell Hall is a grand-ish house in rural Northamptonshire that was completed in 1637, gutted by fire in 1895 and rebuilt shortly afterwards by John Alfred Gotch, who raised a tower on the four corners of the main building and topped each with a roof of hammered lead which climbs into a sharp peak; the allusion seems to be to the Tower of London.
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Dec 1, 2023 | 
literaryreview.co.uk | Andrew Motion |Stephen Regan
Elegiac poetry deals primarily with mortality, so The Penguin Book of Elegy might be seen as the inevitable – if much-delayed – sequel to George MacBeth’s The Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963). That was a quirky production, though, ranging from physical illness to sick jokes. This is a canonical one, which claims to be ‘the only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language’. How to survey all the poetry that has ever been written about death?
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Jul 20, 2023 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Tristram Fane Saunders |Andrew Motion
I don’t pity John Hewitt, the Downing Street secretary tasked with steering the choice of poet laureate in 1972. National Archive papers revealed yesterday include his notes on potential candidates. Stevie Smith? “Unstable.” George Barker? “Unspeakable.” Robert Graves? “Too peculiar.” Hugh MacDiarmid? “Heavily on the bottle.” WH Auden was apparently ruled out on two counts: for having become a US citizen, and having once written a poem about gay sex.
