Waders

This book is made up of fifteen poems that Andrew Motion has written since moving from England to the United States in 2015. It is full of the shock and wonder of such a move, the new seeing and the sadness and the joy. Dazzling in its range of settings and themes, the poems take shape in an equally wide variety of forms as the book takes up haunting questions of home and belonging. Fog and ocean, love and loss.

In the first section of the book, a consideration of place is often linked to pressing ecological issues of our day. In the second, poems about childhood and family intertwine with complicated meditations on generation, inheritance, and independence. And in the long and moving final poem, the jewel of the collection, a startling autobiographical narrative uncovers the poet’s preoccupation with human transience, a preoccupation that binds the whole collection together. Waders is lithe and stunning, a treasure of a book from one of the finest poets writing today.

Andrew Motion was born in London, England, in 1952 and worked for many years as a freelance writer and publisher before becoming Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and then Royal Holloways College, University of London. His poetry has received the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, and the Wilfred Owen Prize, and from 1999-2009 he was the UK Poet Laureate. During this time he co-founded the Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org), and in 2009 he was knighted for his services to poetry. In 2015 he moved to the United States, and now teaches in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore.