A LIFE IN POETRY
Faber, 320pp, £20
Former poet laureate and literary elder Andrew Motion's new memoir received a thorough pasting from young Turk James Marriott in, he wrote, might ‘usefully be described as a meditation on the futility of being Andrew Motion.’ Like Motion's poetry, he continued, his prose ‘aims at a Wordsworthian solemnity and plainness. The still surface is presumably intended to be suggestive of subaqueous profundities and dramas. But all too often the reader feels he has been confronted with a millpond of a man. The author's character presents a turbid and unruffled blank.’ Ouch.
