In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood - Hardcover

Motion, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567923399 ISBN 13: 9781567923391

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2010

Synopsis

William Faulkner's character Quentin in The Sound and the Fury repeatedly observes that "temporary" is "the saddest word of all." Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of British Poet Laureate Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A pæan to his family, to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of his beloved Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with care, clarity, and detail, a whole world long disappeared. The book begins in the present tense in December of 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion's desire to capture and preserve unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. "My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day," writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes."

Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing with his father in Scotland, the horrors of prep school at the tender age of seven, or discovering Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues these recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he would become; readers of his verse will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral substance of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Motion was appointed the British Poet Laureate in May 1999. His poetry and prose have received numerous awards, including the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 1994 his biography of Philip Larkin was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Biography and short-listed for the NCR award. He lives in London where he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Review:

There seems to be no limit to the number of ways in which there might occur what Wordsworth called the growth of a poet's mind . . . He might well have acknowledged a family resemblance in his latest successor. --Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

A sad, gripping and powerful story. --Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

Motion, Britain's poet laureate, was 16 in 1968 when his beloved mother fell into a coma after a hunting accident and his childhood ended suddenly. After this shock opening, Motion recounts the scenes and events of that childhood, which range from warm early memories of growing up country gentry in Hertfordshire to being sent off to a Dickensian boarding school with disgusting food, terrible sanitation and a headmaster who enjoyed beating little boys at age seven. The book soars into the extraordinary when Motion recounts his early teens. A new boarding school brought a sympathetic headmaster who recognized the potential in the unread country boy's love for Dylan and Hendrix and encouraged him toward poetry. (A heartwrenchingly beautiful scene describes his slow, awed discovery of Thomas Hardy.) By age 15, Motion had made his first real friend and entered a new relationship with his mother, who read eagerly in partnership with him. Motion perfectly conveys the new faster time of adolescent thinking and subtly conveys us back to his mother's tragedy with a new understanding of its importance to his entire life. --Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1567923399
• ISBN 13: 9781567923391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 326