Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry

by Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion has been close to the centres of British poetry for over fifty years.

Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion - to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nation's character.

Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motion's formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role.

By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motion's contention that the poems we most enjoy 'are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life's daily bread'.

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 18, 2023

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

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting look at his life in poetry and the people he met and some of his work

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Motion, who is tall elegant and fair, a kind of verse Heseltine…

Alan Bennett

The above comment was meant as praise, comparing Motion’s appearance with that of the well-groomed Tory politician. After finishing Sleeping on Islands, Motion’s second volume of memoirs, some readers may read that comment a little differently. Although subtitled ‘a life in poetry’, ‘a life in networking’ is just as apt.

Motion’s talent for cultivating useful contacts started early on. To be fair, the desire to be mentored was part of it, and the need to be near the centre of English poetry even more so. This involved risk even at pampered Oxford. On meeting W.H. Auden (his face ‘fissured like limestone’) the elderly poet revealed a drawing of a naked boy, smiled, and asked Motion what he’d like. Martini, he answered, ignoring his host’s meaning. Say what you will about Motion’s tenure at UEA but I doubt any of his ‘clever, talented’ students ever endured that.

The same desire took him to Hull where Philip Larkin promptly became his next target. The move to the North of England mystified his Oxford pals (you’re going where?), most of whom seemed to slide with appalling ease into the London literary life. Despite his distaste for novels - he regarded them as the sworn enemy of verse - Motion found himself required to teach them, which must have been a unique experience for his students. The shabby accommodation and isolation was a toll Motion gladly paid to be near his idol. Readers of the Larkin biography may wish to re-read the Hull chapters here and find a more rounded, courteous version of the poet, as well as a more direct sense of what it was like to actually be around him.

I find the next parts somewhat depressing. On returning to London, Motion lands plum literary jobs as easily as snoring. Editor of Poetry Review, poetry editor at Chatto and Windus, then editor. Thankfully, the life isn’t as glamorous as you may imagine. Carmen Callil sounds like every crap boss who ever breathed - delegating the difficult jobs to others, loud, forever changing her mind and casually tripling everyone else’s workload. Despite Motion’s people-pleasing tact it’s clear most authors are bad-tempered, domineering and difficult. Motion remembers meeting Angela Carter and being asked his opinion of Raymond Carver’s recently published story collection Elephant. Before he can answer Carter snaps ‘bourgeois sentimentalism’ at him and strides off. And if Raymond Carver is ‘bourgeois’, a bolder man might have answered, then I’m Flash fucking Gordon.

Motion captures the arbitrariness of the literary world. A.S. Byatt’s latest novel is dumped before the committee like a soggy nappy (something odd about Victorians, perhaps better published elsewhere?). Motion has to plead its case before the firm takes it on. The next year Possession stole the 1990 Booker from John McGahern. Motion greased the wheels for others too. Alan Hollinghurst, a chum from Oxford, published The Swimming Pool Library (‘the best first novel I’d ever read’) with Chatto months after Motion read the typescript. This closed-circle chumminess had its downside. When Motion and Blake Morrison jointly edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, the book’s outrageous London-Oxbridge bias was widely panned. Most subsequent anthologies - Sean O’Brien’s The Firebox, Neil Astley’s Staying Alive - have reacted against it.

The charge of gatekeeping stuck. Wherever Motion went some mini-scandal seemed to follow. Larkin die-hards took him to task for exposing the great poet as a bigoted miser and porn addict. His elegy for Ted Hughes read more like a job application for the laureateship. After he received the job, the ‘cash for couplets’ affair ensued, then charges of plagiarism. But that charge was based on a wilful misunderstanding, and ignored the fact that the sequence - about soldiers and their struggles - were found poems, trusting the men’s largely unedited words from interviews to tell their story.

Whatever we think about Motion’s spell as laureate, this was a new and dignified mode of genuinely public poetry. Motion has used the same technique in a poem on old people’s homes with equal success. I wish he had included it in his latest Selected Poems, which tellingly excludes all the laureate verse and includes only a single poem from the Public Property collection. One laureate poem, Motion freely admits - a toe-curlingly bad rap lyric written for Prince Harry’s 18th birthday - was an act of ‘self-sabotage.’ Blocked and depressed, he was reminded sharply of the fact that while many laureates have been great poets, great laureate poems remain rare birds indeed.

It would be ungrateful to deny that Motion delivered (and then some) when it came to the ambassadorial part of the job - ‘taking up the cudgel for poetry’ - and founding the Poetry Archive was a triumph for which he deserves all the credit posterity can bestow. I am glad he finally learned to say ‘no’ to judge this, to serve on that committee or to advance that cause and found more time to recollect emotion in tranquility.

He may always be dismissed as the Waitrose Larkin but the values his poetry celebrate - clarity, loyalty, a respect for the dignity of ordinary people - should not.

[Rehan Qayoom]

'The words I most wanted to use in my own poems were always just out of reach. I could see them hovering in the dream-distance, but could never stretch far enough into my mind, never cross over some barrier in myself. Then one evening I did cross over ... Because what I'd felt while writing those lies had nothing to do with plotting and planning. It was more like retrieving something. More like remembering than inventing. This seemed unlikely, but the longer I thought about it, the better it made sense - because my greatest pleasure as a reader also seemed like forms of recognition. When I enjoyed a poem, I almost never felt, 'That's new to me!', but rather, 'That's right! That's it!' - as though something I'd previously known only in outline, or known and forgotten again, had at last been completed and returned to me. Completed in ways that made the world seem more nearly finished, even though in a sense my own self had been annihilated in the process.'

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you'd expect from a former poet laureate, Andrew Motion has a way with words. An enjoyable read, charting the impact of his mother's tragic accident on his writing, whilst at the same time, celebrating the chequered path of his career in poetry, including a fascinating insight into his friendship with W H Auden and Philip Larkin, and the demands of life as a poet laureate. Having met him at a recent book signing, I was thrilled to hear of his initiative in setting up the Poetry Archive, which he covers in the book - as he put it, "his line in the sand". Recommended, if you're interested in poetry (or even if you're not).

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always thought him a second rate poet and very self absorbed. This book hasn’t changed my mind

[John Howes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and highly readable life story of the former poet laureate.