Andrew Motion - Randomly Moving Particles

Andrew Motion - Randomly Moving Particles (Faber)

Andrew Motion's name has always offered itself for wordplay, from there being 'poetry in motion', the fact that Motion came after The Movement or, now, Motion's Randomly Moving Particles sounding like something half-forgotten from the 'O' level Physics syllabus. The joke is never quite there, though, and it isn't here, either, this being serious and with plenty of science in it.

It is two long poems with three not so long in the interval. I have to admit I haven't seen the most recent Motion books but none of the length of the poems, their fragmentary nature, their narrative structure or the impressive line in imagery come as much of a surprise even if they have come a long way from the water-colour, reflective post-Movement poetry he began with, winning a Cholmondeley Award in 1979.

The title poem here ranges widely over America, where Motion lives these days, from memories of the death of his father, exploration of the solar system, culture apparently being reduced to a lowest common denominator, whether or not as a corollary of Donald Trump, the extinction of species and the science implied by all of it essentially the action of randomly moving particles. Much of it retains Motion's non-urgent tone but there is something more desperate in it than his usually calm demeanour suggests, as there always has been.

Some of this sounds as if it's been lifted from a text book rather than fired in the red-hot kiln of poetic inspiration,

More than 40% of the planet's insects are now in decline

at a rate eight times faster than mammals, birds and reptiles,

amounting to a collapse of 2.5 per cent every year for the last thirty.

 

It is a sort of evolution but it's not pretty and, even if it's a bit late for our generation who presided over so much of it, there is still time to side with Greta Thunberg even if only in Faber's Armani- style hard covers. Later, in Rainfall, he demonstrates some of his old gift in lines like,

after one partucular inundation

     and the shadow of an ark

            darkening fish shoals

as they scooted over valleys and hills  

 

where, as ever, I'm not sure what the line indentations achieve, but there is enough to be admired of the Motion we once knew while much of the book finds him too (perfectly understandably) cross to be lyrical.

The passage beginning O Trump is he still here expresses something beyond exasperation for so many of us and although any portrait of the president becomes obsolete before the ink dries as he outstrips his own astonishing performance in the race to the bottom, this section captures him accurately in his,

spasmodic, self-interuppting, false, severely unintelligible

as explicit statement but highly expressive by implication,

false, egocentric and inconsiderate, never showing teeth

when smiling, smiling seldom,

 

but once one has started, there is really nowhere one can stop. Awfulness is its own defence and I fear that Motion's sombre mood is because he's taken on more than he can do justice to. 

But, let's face it, this is that dread thing, a 'poem sequence' if anything ever was. For me, it is a poem under one title in a number of sections in different forms but they can stand alone or be allowed to accumulate to more than their individual parts by being read in sequence. I only ever opposed the idea of the poem sequence because it seemed unnecessary and a bit effete when any such thing is either one big poem in parts or several poems that belong together but if anything is such, it is probably this.

The sciences involved are physics, astronomy and Environmental Studies with the three middle poems being themed on extinction and survival.

Longest, though, is How Do the Dead Walk, a narrative about a veteran back from Afghanistan who is taken into the underworld into a sort of Inferno where he meets his dead mother under whose influence he murders the rest of the family. One might compare it with Thom Gunn's poems on Jeffrey Dahmer that sees atrocity from the inside. It is not without memorable moments, like

beneath tickertape herring shoals

flickering                     glimmering 

and one is tempted to consider the effects of post-traumatic stress, the after effects of war manifesting themselves in further gratuitous violence. We are, I think, left with the suggestion he's off to shoot himself, too, at the end. It is a disturbing addition to Motion's war poetry to date and it certainly shouldn't be an easy read but I don't know how successful it is here, or would be in poetry by anybody else. One can say it's powerful without wanting to read it again any time soon.

But we can't complain that Andrew Motion has not taken risks and ventured beyond his gentlemanly meditations. From Anne Frank Huis to his National Poetry Competition competition winner, The Letter, we should not be taken aback by violence either. The difference might be that in writing about his mother's death or his friend's on the Marchioness pleasure cruise in Fresh Water, we were dealing with the aftershock rather than the graphic illustration.  

I'm not going to be easy to convince that Randomly Moving Particles compares with Motion's best work which provided a few of the best poems of his generation but he moves on, unhappily for the most part, it seems, and nobody is going to find fault with him for that.