Andrew Motion pays tribute to his poetic mentors

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’. He is, as one might expect, good on poetry’s general appeal – ‘ it prizes compression and distillation in a world of deliquescence’ – and perceptive on the root cause of its lure for him.

Those who know Motion’s writing will be aware of the formative wound of his mother’s riding accident. Poetry offered, in Motion’s reading, a means of arresting time: ‘It might preserve my mother’s life in words that survived her.’ He is enraptured by posterity: ‘The ancient black words looked so delicate on the whiteness, their survival felt like a miracle.’ He argues against a student’s assertion that all poems are love poems: ‘I thought all poems were a form of elegy.’

Poetry also provided ammunition in a phoney war against his father which is, surprisingly, one of the book’s structuring throughlines. A teenage pilgrimage to Rupert Brooke’s grave on Skyros is an act of ‘loyalty to a creed that had nothing to do with parents’; and defiance, albeit often unwitting or regretted, runs through his relationship with his father, ‘the saddest person I’ve ever known’. There’s a dawning realignment in Motion, for so long a poet associated with the tragedy of his mother: ‘Now that my father was no longer someone I had to fear, or dance around in a prolonged waltz of obligation… I could see that his life had been the larger force.’