Top 6 - Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion is coming to Portsmouth next week to talk about local poet, Tennyson. So, to mark the occasion, here's a Top 6 of him and then next week, with our memories refreshed and our tastes reawakened, we can do Tennyson.

It might be fair to say that Andrew didn't quite capture the public's imagination in the same way that Tennyson did, or their affection like Betjeman did or even their prurient interest like Hughes did, but he put in an honest shift and made himself available. He might have been a rather more diffident personality than is useful in such a public position but he was never less than a humane and considerate poet.

The outstanding anthology piece and memorable early poem is Anne Frank Huis in which 'just listening is a kind of guilt' because one can't help but feel guilt even for the mundane opportunity,

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to leave as simply

as I do, and walk at ease

up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch

a silent barge come clear of bridges

settling their reflections in the blue canal.

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Sometimes stylistically reminiscent of his early hero, Edward Thomas, he is especially good at this quiet elegy. Fresh Water is a longer poem in memoriam his friend Ruth Haddon who died on the Marchioness, the poem following the Thames from its obscure sources down to London, the party, the disaster and then Ruth 'swimming back upstream'. In an age when poems are so often made to fit so tidily onto one page, it is a masterpiece of an extended idea.

Another influence, Philip Larkin, is remembered in 'This is your subject speaking' in which Motion's sympathetic narrative recalls a last visit to see Larkin both vividly and sensitively.

And Motion's mother, tragically killed in a riding accident, although remembered often elsewhere, is memorialized also in a poem called Serenade, about the horse she fell off that lives on in a kind of unknowing culpability.

You do, I do is a fine love poem capturing one of those glorious moments of togetherness in the lines,

I feel a stranger to myself

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and all the lives I've led - like someone travelling,

whose boat has suddenly stood off a sunlit coast

with him on deck, who never saw these cliffs before,

or smelt this new mown grass smell drifting out to sea,

but knows at once that he belongs here, and he's home.

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I won't award a prize for spotting the borrowing from Thomas in those lines or even blame Motion for it- I'm sure we all do it- but it stands out a mile whenever I read those lines.

And I think I'll put another early poem in to complete the selection, The Whole Truth, another love poem, slightly more domestic but using that tremendous opposition of absence and imagined presence, thinking of each other, to understated great effect.

In a way it might have been Motion's most attractive feature, a lack of showmanship and an inwardly, watercolourist nature, that worked against his widespread acceptance by a public more used to celebrity attention seeking. He might have been better off without the job at all but I'm sure he benefitted from it in many ways and he is the poet I've seen most often which is perhaps as much to do with his availability as it is with me being a big fan of his work. But I am a big fan of his best work.

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Next week, then, Tennyson.