Andrew Motion

New Selected Poems

I have nothing to say to you about the Booker Prize longlist. Let me know if you read any and would recommend them. Instead, I’m going to write about Andrew Motion’s New and Selected Poems 1977–2022, which came out last month. It has several new poems and selects the old work a little differently to his previous Selected Poems. If you don’t know Motion’s work, I would encourage you to read him.

Like Betjeman and Larkin, Motion is a fundamentally biographical and autobiographical poet, following his ultimate well-spring Wordsworth. Motion is probably destined to become like Crabbe, a good poet at the end of a tradition. And of course the laureate poems will always be a mark against his reputation. (Though the creation of The Poetry Archive was the best thing any modern Poet Laureate has done.)

He can still write like this though—

…each wave throws a ring
of primrose foam that’s nothing like a storm
round fallen rocks…

Good stuff. And plenty of it in this collection. Unfortunately, this is the sort of observation that is entirely unoriginal as poetry. Poetry may not have described the ring of primrose foam before, but the essence of poetry is invention and Motion at his best often feels uninventive.

Motion also sometimes uses the sort of pointless heavy metaphors that add little to the purpose of a poem, slow the reader down for trivial reasons, and gradually reveal themselves to be the real intent,—a poem as excuse for fanciful wordplay.

…a handsome and deciduous street tree

with rugged bark in elephantine ridges
and russet twigs adopting green until,
when flowering, it amplifies with bees

that, as they tune their soporific song
and load their golden panniers…

Elephantine, adopting, amplifies, soporific, panniers… what use do these words add to the overall meaning of the poem? We do not see anything fresh or understand anything strange from this.

If I wanted to be a pedant, I would ask whether “amplifies” even means anything here, unless Motion is punning on the seventeenth century meaning (now long obsolete) of “To enlarge or extend in space or capacity.” He may also be intending “To extend or increase (anything immaterial) in amount, importance, dignity, etc.”

This is not quite poetry anymore, it is dictionary play. Amplify in common speech means “make louder”, especially when applied to the “soporific song” of bees. And you cannot amplify a silent tree. This sort of writing is a weakness and Motion is better than this. Or can be.

You see this faux poetry in his repetitions too. The primrose foam is a repeat from an earlier poem, ‘The Fox Provides for Himself’—

Weak winter sunlight sank through the beach tree next door
skimming the top of our dividing wall, spilling a primrose stain
surprisingly far into our patch…

Light doesn’t spill a stain! And what is so surprising about winter light going a long way?—the sun is low in the sky in winter. Common sense cannot be disregarded in the quest to write a sonorous line. Metaphor has to take us beyond reality, into something else, not just into whimsical language.

Larkin wouldn’t approve and Motion is at his best when writing in the plain style, under Larkin’s influence, in Wordsworth’s “language really used by men”, such as in the excellent earlier poems ‘Anne Frank Huis’, ‘Serenade’, and ‘Belfast’. He knows how to resist the empty decorative pseudo-metaphor if he wants to, which is why his childhood memoir In the Blood is so wonderful.

I am happier, overall, with my older Selected Poems 1976-1997, which contains ‘In the Attic’, sadly uncollected here. Motion really is a writer of elegies and one day ought to be selected and collected as such. I look forward to reading Motion’s new memoir as he is a splendid biographical writer.