First World War Poems
Andrew Motion2003

Questions of time, the erosion of places and the workings of memory are encoded in Motion’s sparse, unflinching poems, which bring quotidian moments to vivid emotional life. His most writing grapples often with grief; where earlier work has dealt with his mother’s riding accident, subsequent illness and death, new work focuses on his relationship with his father. He remembers a man and a soldier, who was ‘an expert with silence,’ as the extraordinary poem Passing On attests, and also proves Motion himself to be. Several of the poems take place in the hiatus of twilight like the meeting of father and son in ‘Veteran’ in which the true nature of the former’s war experiences remains “hidden in his words.”

The figure of the soldier appears in many poems; Motion has spent time with those who have served in wars from WWII to more recently in Afghanistan, and with their loved ones, bearing witness in his writing to their experiences of death and survival. Other poems touch on lives curtailed by accident or war – Ann Frank, Princess Diana, and personal friends like Ruth Haddon whose death in the Marchioness disaster is commemorated in his beautiful elegy ‘Fresh Water’. Motion’s poems question whether any meaning can be gleaned from life’s random events and question whether we, like his mother’s horse in ‘Serenade’ or the fox terrier in ‘The Dog of the Light Brigade’, are simply “waiting for something important to happen, only nothing ever did,/beyond the next day and the next,”.

Titre original : First World War Poems (2003)