Coming in to Land - Softcover

From England’s former poet laureate, a collection of selected poetry spanning his celebrated career

Andrew Motion has said, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp.” Though the territory of his exploration may be murky and mired—the front lines of war, political entanglements, romantic longing, and human suffering—Motion’s conversational tone and lyrical style make for clear, bold poems that speak to contradictions at the heart of the human condition. 

In the tradition of English pastoral poetry that includes Ted Hughes, John Clare, and William Wordsworth, these poems skate over sweeping empires and plumb emotional depths, settling in a meditative, understated register. As an introduction to one of England’s most lauded living poets, Coming in to Land offers a moving depiction of this writer’s career as a chronicler of modernity’s pitfalls and triumphs.

Andrew Motion was poet laureate in the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009, and is the 2015 winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for his collection Peace Talks. The author of several biographies, he won the Whitbread Prize for Biography for his authorized life of Philip Larkin (1993). He has published a memoir, In the Blood (2006), and two acclaimed young adult novels based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Silver and The New World. Cofounder of The Poetry Archive, Motion was knighted for services to poetry in 2009. He is currently Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.