Motion The Customs House

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28812-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten

Andrew Motion's new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels and Donkeys, on Armistice Day 2010), drawing on soldiers' experiences of war from 1914 until today - beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon and moving via World War Two and Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the poems are in the voices of combatants, others are based on memories of the poet's father, who landed at D-day and fought in France and Germany. The poems combine understatement with a clear-eyed and unswerving candour. The Customs House has other rooms: a group of topographies, mapping moments in a marriage against the contingencies of place and family history; and several 'found poems', in which the poet collaborates with his source, mixing what is there already with what is about to be there: whether a remarkable sonnet sequence on the last days of the Baroque genius Francesco Borromini, or in other poems a richly imagined extrapolation from the silent premises of a painting.

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. He is Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Motion, Andrew