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Waterstones in Hull are extremely supportive of Hull
& East Riding writers, and carry a stock of many of the books mentioned on this site.
While it would be an overstatement to associate Andrew Motion (born in 1952, and raised in Essex) too strongly with Hull (on the basis of four years' teaching at Hull University), he has done much to promote the work of Philip Larkin, and he has written a couple of smashing books. The jury seems still to be out on the status of his poetry, though.
"Ways of Life"
Alongside his work as a poet he also had a significant career as a prize-winning biographer and an illuminating critic. "Ways of Life" celebrates this talent with a selection of his articles about painters and poets, as well as a number of striking personal pieces. The literary essays in "Ways of Life" look at a wide assortment of writers, from John Clare and Ivor Gurney, to marginal figures such as Leigh Hunt and Joseph Severn, and reassess the less well-known work of celebrated writers including John Donne, Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy. "Ways of Life" is an original, acute and emotionally-charged collection of writings, from a truly important and insightful writer.
"In the Blood"
"This is a marvellous book. It describes rural upper class England with exactness, candour and humour … Finally, and most importantly, it's a wonderful read. Every word, sentence and chapter, one drinks down with joy because it is so artfully and beautifully composed." "The most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read … a passionate account of a man’s love for his parents and for the countryside in which he grew up … In the Blood will always be Andrew Motion’s elegy to his mother. For those of us fortunate enough to read this superlative memoir, it’s a celebration of mothers everywhere."
"Keats"
The most striking thing about this distinguished biography is that it is the work of a poet writing about a poet, and so a book about the writing of poetry. The facts of Keats's life are all here: the early loss of his parents, the unsympathetic guardian, his tender care for his siblings and his gruelling medical training at Guy's Hospital. A vivid picture emerges of intellectual and political friendships: of the radical influence of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt, of his harsh treatment by contemporary critics and his complex relationships with women. The heart of the book is Motion's analysis of Keats's search for a poetical identity.
"The Invention of Dr. Cake"
"It is a charming story about the meetings between Dr William Tabor and Dr Cake, as the latter is dying of consumption. They discuss medicine and poetry and without giving away the idea of the book I can say that maybe Dr Cake is not Dr Cake at all, but someone else, someone very famous. In this short novel the brilliant biographer Andrew Motion makes fiction out of biographical facts, though there is no way of knowing whether they are really facts or not. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating story."
"Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright"
Andrew Motion brings all his lyricism and inventiveness to bear in this fictional autobiography of the great swindler, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A painter, writer, and friend of Blake, Byron, and Keats, Wainewright was almost certainly a murderer. When he died in a penal colony in Tasmania, he left behind fragments of documents and a beguiling legend which Motion uses to create an imagined confession laced with facts, telling the story as no straightforward history could. "Brilliantly innovative, gripping, intricately researched, Motion's biography does justice to its subject at last.
"Selected Poems - 1976-1997"
"A child asks if people drown in the Thames. A favourite flower-print dress disappears. Loved ones die. Empties are dragged to the curb. Though rooted in the ordinary, Motion's poems are anything but. Unpredictable, unsentimentally elegant, Motion has inherited all the rhythmic and narrative genius of Robert Frost. "I stamp both feet and disappear in a cloud," he announces in "Fresh Water." Lucky for us, he's speaking metaphorically."
"Public Property"
"Though criticised for being a traditional choice for the
Laureateship, it is Motion's engagement with a classic lyric line that makes his work rewarding. His clarity, iambic rhythms,
natural idiom and subtle evocation of shades of emotion place him in apostolic succession to Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Frost,
Thomas, Bishop and Larkin.
Also: (click on title to go to Waterstones.com)
"The Pleasure Steamers"
"The Pleasure Steamers" is Andrew Motion's first collection of poems. Formally adventurous, in the way his work has continued to be, the collection explores relationships, geographies and the legacy of the past to the present. Long sequences such as "Inland" and "Anniversaries" are interspersed with short, sharp lyrics which display the control, flare and delicacy which are the hallmarks of the Poet Laureate.
Marriage in its widest sense, as a commitment to and love for places and things as much as for people, is the broad theme of Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry. At the centre, however, are the stories of two 'conventional' marriages, their spoken and unspoken habits and rules that are a necessary part of a couple's life, the private, unshared memories triggered unexpectedly by public things that lead to a flight of fantasy and then a safe return. The strands of 'life's love' - public and private - are woven together with a subtlety for which Motion is renowned, but there is a directness, too, which makes this collection all the more memorable.
This book consists of two long poems. "Lines of Desire" tells the story of an individual in crisis, under cruel pressure both from past and present events. "Joe Soap" combines narrative and lyric forms to trace a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary apocalypse.
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