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.