The Cinder Path

Description

Andrew Motion's new collection offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens. The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities. Here are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of the poet's father.

Andrew Motion was born in 1952. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His novella, The Invention of Dr Cake, was published in 2003 and was described as 'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' (Sunday Telegraph), and 'amazingly clever' (Irish Times). His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read' in the Independent on Sunday.