Public Property

In his first collection since being appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion negotiates the very space of poetry, moving between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In the opening series of idylls he conjures the expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood, in scenes as precisely remembered as they are irretrievable. Elsewhere he reconsiders moments from the Victorian past from reticent and surprising angles, and elsewhere again he tackles distinctly contemporary themes and situations. The final section of the book contains a number of elegies and love poems, written in a variety of lyric forms, which provoke concerns that are among the most critical in poetry: What is public art? To whom do our most private sentiments belong?

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.