Declan Ryan

Andrew Motion pays tribute to his poetic mentors

In a second memoir, Motion focuses on how he became a poet, and his search for father figures, including W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin

Andrew Motion. [Aisha Butler] 
issue 20 May 2023

Andrew Motion has previously published a memoir of childhood, In the Blood (2006), but this new book focuses on his becoming a poet, his search for mentors and subsequent writing life. Motion, a country boy, has a Words-worthian bent, and talks about the pull of evocative recollections, already hardening when he entered adulthood, as ‘equivalent to the songs of the Sirens’, explicitly ‘spots of time’.

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