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Andrew Motion’s prose memoir In the Blood (2006) was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval and a hymn to familial love. Now, twelve years later and three years after moving to live and work in the United States, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel – but this time in verse.
Essex Clay rekindles, expands and gives a tragic resonance to subjects that have haunted the poet throughout his writing life. In the first part, he tells the story of his mother’s riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second, he remembers the end of his father’s life; and in the third, he describes an encounter that deepens the poem’s tangled themes of loss and memory and retrieval. Although the prevailing mood of the poem has a sweeping Tennysonian melancholy, its wealth of physical details and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are impossible.
A cinematic unspooling of free verse ... its fragmentary form is constructed to interrogate and replay the processes of trauma ... Motion seems to be laying bare his own history in order to speak also for other individuals and their families.
Essex Clay returns to a subject which has done so much to shape Andrew Motion's imaginative life: the riding accident which left his mother in a coma and from which she never fully recovered ... the book-length poem is written in the present tense and the third person. It looks - and it is very visually rich - to give the events a third dimension, so that although the subject is foreknown and foresuffered, it can be realized afresh.
Autobiographical poetry that derives power from startling sensory imagery and the sound-sense of words.
Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive, and has written acclaimed biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats among others. His memoir of childhood, In the Blood, was published in 2006, and its sequel, Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry, appeared alongside Selected Poems: 1977 – 2022 in 2023.…
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