The Mower: New & Selected Poems - Softcover

Motion, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567923895 ISBN 13: 9781567923896

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2009

Synopsis

The Mower introduces the poetry of British poet laureate Andrew Motion to American readers for the first time. This selection, chosen by Andrew Motion himself, is an outstanding representation of the poet's varied body of work elegies, sonnets, poems of social and political observation, and unsentimental poems about childhood, post-war England, and natural life composed over the course of three decades.

A significant and consistent feature of Motion's work, throughout his shifts in style and changes in imaginative topog­raphies, is his signature clarity of observation, his un­willingness to sacrifice intelligibility or embrace opacity. Instead, Motion employs the full power of the English language to do his bidding, and, in love with words as he is, the words cooperate, communicate transforming the intangible, the abstract into intelligible images, associations, and ultimately, knowledge.

In his role as poet laureate for the past ten years, Motion has worked to make poetry more widely available to the general public free of charge (through his online archiving of poets reading their work at The Poetry Archive).

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

About his poetry, Motion has observed: "I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin."

Indeed, a significant and consistent feature of Motion's work, throughout his shifts in style and changes in imaginative topographies, is his signature clarity of observation, his unwillingness to sacrifice intelligibility or embrace opacity. Instead, Motion employs the full power of the English language to do his bidding, and, in love with words as he is, the words cooperate, communicate--transforming the intangible, the abstract into intelligible images, associations, and ultimately, knowledge.

In his role as poet laureate for the past ten years, Motion has worked to make poetry more widely available to the general public free of charge (through his online archiving of poets reading their work at The Poetry Archive) and has tried to demystify verse, saying simply, "The best poems are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget. Any heavier definition than that begins to collapse under its own weight and exclude many forms of poetry." Motion's own lyrical poems, many written in formal meter and rhyme, speak to usclearly and memorably, meeting his own challenge with flying colors.

About the Author:

Andrew Motion was appointed the British Poet Laureate in May 1999. His poetry and prose have received numerous awards, including the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 1994 his biography of Philip Larkin was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Biography and short-listed for the NCR award. He lives in London where he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1567923895
• ISBN 13: 9781567923896
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 123