Salt Water

by Andrew Motion

Salt Water is Andrew Motion's most ambitious collection, yet also his most accessible. The first part refines the narrative and lyric skills for which he is well-known, combining intense personal concerns with themes which are more expansive and social. Family and loved ones appear in the company of historical and legendary figures; private dramas raise large general issues. But there is concentration as well as diversity. From the Orford Merman of the title poem, to an elegy written for a friend who died on the Marchioness, to the vivid prose meditation of the second part, written when Andrew Motion retraced the voyage that John Keats made by sea from London to Naples in the autumn of 1820, the book insistently and brilliantly elaborates images of water. It is the element which facilitates a rich interweaving of past and present, of re-enacted experience and the poignant suspension of the lived-in moment.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who presided as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.

Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent. The Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney had ruled himself out for the post. Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years. The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack.

He wanted to write "poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life," rather than be seen a 'courtier'. So, he wrote "for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle I've finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies." In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict, and in 2005, Spring Wedding in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. Commissioned to write in the honour of 109 year old Harry Patch, the last surviving 'Tommy' to have fought in World War I, Motion composed a five part poem, read and received by Patch at the Bishop's Palace in Wells in 2008. As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.

Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been "very, very damaging to [his] work". The appointment of Motion met with criticism from some quarters. As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian which concluded, "To have had 10 years working as laureate has been remarkable. Sometimes it's been remarkably difficult, the laureate has to take a lot of flak, one way or another. More often it has been remarkably fulfilling. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I'm giving it up – especially since I mean to continue working for poetry." Motion spent his last day as Poet Laureate holding a creative writing class at his alma mater, Radley College, before giving a poetry reading and thanking Peter Way, the man who taught him English at Radley, for making him who he was. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009.

Andrew Motion nació en 1952. Estudió en el University College de Oxford y empezó su carrera enseñando inglés en la Universidad de Hull. También ha sido director de Poetry Review, director editorial de Chatto & Windus, y Poeta Laureado; asimismo, fue cofundador del Poetry Archive, y en 2009 se le concedió el título de Sir por su obra literaria. En la actualidad es profesor de escritura creativa en el Royal Holloway, de la Universidad de Londres. Es miembro de la Royal Society of Literature y vive en Londres. Con un elenco de nobles marineros y crueles piratas, y llena de historias de amor y de valentía, Regreso a la isla del tesoro es una trepidante continuación de La isla del tesoro, escrita con extraordinaria autenticidad y fuerza imaginativa por uno de los grandes escritores ingleses actuales.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slightly odd duck. The first half of the book is a collection of really rather fine poetry and the second half of the book is a kind of prose travelogue telling how the author retraced the voyage that John Keats made by sea from London to Naples in the autumn of 1820, with the occasional poem thrown in along the way.

The poetry is great and I even enjoyed the second half of the book, despite it not being the sort of thing I’d normally seek out. A very enjoyable read.

To Whom It May Concern

This poem about ice cream
has nothing to do with government,
with riot, with any political scheme.

It is a poem about ice cream. You see?
About how you might stroll into a shop
and ask: One Strawberry Split. One Mivvi.

What did I tell you? No one will die.
No licking tongues will melt like candle wax.
This is a poem about ice cream. Do not cry.

[Richard Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little underwhelmed by this volume. I am not a regular reader of poetry, but recently I enjoyed a volume of poems so I thought I'd try again. This is not a bad book but it did not do much for me. There does not seem to be any real connection between the poems, other than they are all by Andrew Motion - maybe I missed something, or perhaps this is normal in poetry books. The exception was the longer prose or prose poem where Motion recounts a sailing trip to Italy following in Keats's footsteps. I enjoyed that a little more. I don't see this as the end of foray into poetry, but perhaps it is the end of my journey into Andrew Motion's work. A shame, as although I wasn't overly impressed by the work - it did not work for me - there is a sense of the person beneath the poems and that is a positive sense.

[Gavin Lightfoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good poetry but also a heartfelt account of Motion's sailing trip from London to Rome, retracing the final journey of Keat's, before he died in Rome of TB.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second half of Motion's book is a long prose piece, recounting his experience sailing on a fishing trawler from Tower Bridge to Naples, tracing Keat's final journey. The first half is a collection of poems - many melancholy or valedictory in tone - which through close observation slow us down and focus our attention on small, deep happenings - a small child stung by a bee, a dying woman's white arm emerging from her hospital-shift sleeve, a childhood episode of vandalism.

Two long narrative poems bookend the collection. The last poem, 'Salt Water', imagines the 'Orford Merman', fished from the Thames in the 1150s; the first, 'Fresh Water (for Ruth Haddon)', recounts different aspects of the Thames in Motion's life, from tracing it to its source with his brother when they were both teenagers, watching a friend punting (a passage that sounds university-aged, those kind of time-consuming pranks you can only afford at that time); watching divers dredge the river, visiting Tower Bridge with his wife and children. The poem concludes with the picture of Ruth Haddon, one of 51 people drowned on the Thames in 1989 when the pleasureboat Marchioness was struck by a dredger:

... There's nothing else to do,
so I paddle through the shallow water surrounding the spring,
treading carefully to keep things in focus,

and stoop over the source as though I find it fascinating.
It is fascinating. A red-brown soft-lipped cleft
with bright green grass right up to the edge,

and the water twisting out like a rope of grass.

...

There is Ruth swimming back upstream, her red velvet party dress
flickering round her heels as she twists through the locks
and dreams round the slow curves, slithering on for miles

until she has passed the ponderous diver at Folly Bridge
and the reed-forests at Lechlade, accelerating beneath bridges and willow branches,
slinking easily among the plastic wrecks and weedy trolleys,

speeding and shrinking and silvering until finally she is sliding uphill
over bright green grass and into the small wet mouth of the earth,
where she vanishes.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

English poet. Currently Poet Laureate. I liked his poems, but the content hasn’t stayed with me as much as Heaney’s did.

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned:
“That’s our destination ahead – where those chimneys are billowing – but we never seem to get any closer. I curl down into my nest. I could stay like this for ever, living this in-between life”

I’ve been aware of Motion, and enjoyed some of the poetry but always seen him to be far removed in terms of lifestyle and commentary. I didn’t expect this collection to change that view, but the unexpected second part narrative, whilst still 8 lifestyles away from my own, gave a proper insight into the character and his attempt to understand life and his influential figure of Keats… this certainly was palpably a part low for him…

I enjoyed the poetry and oddly ended up reading the first part week by week on a swimming pool balcony!