The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

This comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motion’s distinguished body of work from ‘Secret Narratives’ (1983) to his most recent volume, ‘Randomly Moving Particles’ (2020), and includes a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems. Certain preoccupations unite the book, which from first to last is particularly concerned with the ways in which our lives are shaped by loss – by wars, by accidents, by the erosions of time and by grief. But as a poet Andrew Motion is also an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while the shapes and voices of the poems mostly prove this by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and collaborate with documentary sources.