WADERS
Waders is made up of fifteen poems that Andrew Motion has written since moving from England to the United States in 2015. It is full of the shock and wonder of such a move, the new seeing and the sadness and the joy. Dazzling in its range of settings and themes, the poems take shape in an equally wide variety of forms as the book takes up haunting questions of home and belonging. Fog and ocean, love and loss.
In the first section of the book, a consideration of place is often linked to pressing ecological issues of our day. In the second, poems about childhood and family intertwine with complicated meditations on generation, inheritance, and independence. And in the long and moving final poem, the jewel of the collection, a startling autobiographical narrative uncovers the poet’s preoccupation with human transience, a preoccupation that binds the whole collection together. Waders is lithe and stunning, a treasure of a book from one of the finest poets writing today.
Praise for Waders
“Waders asks what is ‘worth the risk of expression’; the answer is found in these poems, which insist on nature, love, and ‘the accurate dimension of eternity.’”
—Virginia Konchan, Poetry Foundation
“Waders is full and lush. It is the natural world with all its beauty and complications. It’s also the world of family; of a son and mother and father. It’s a world of love but also loneliness. Motion is a listener, an observer who shares what he sees but never lectures, never tells us what is right or wrong, only that we are not alone.”
—Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
“Not only is Andrew Motion an attentive writer of elegy and even nostalgia, he is a keen recorder of how it feels now, in this instant, to be alive.”
—Candia McWilliam, author of Scotsman
“Motion is a beautiful lyricist, unpretentiously and precisely describing those things worth having even as he casts unsettling shadows across them.”
—Robert Potts, The Guardian
In the first section of the book, a consideration of place is often linked to pressing ecological issues of our day. In the second, poems about childhood and family intertwine with complicated meditations on generation, inheritance, and independence. And in the long and moving final poem, the jewel of the collection, a startling autobiographical narrative uncovers the poet’s preoccupation with human transience, a preoccupation that binds the whole collection together. Waders is lithe and stunning, a treasure of a book from one of the finest poets writing today.
Praise for Waders
“Waders asks what is ‘worth the risk of expression’; the answer is found in these poems, which insist on nature, love, and ‘the accurate dimension of eternity.’”
—Virginia Konchan, Poetry Foundation
“Waders is full and lush. It is the natural world with all its beauty and complications. It’s also the world of family; of a son and mother and father. It’s a world of love but also loneliness. Motion is a listener, an observer who shares what he sees but never lectures, never tells us what is right or wrong, only that we are not alone.”
—Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
“Not only is Andrew Motion an attentive writer of elegy and even nostalgia, he is a keen recorder of how it feels now, in this instant, to be alive.”
—Candia McWilliam, author of Scotsman
“Motion is a beautiful lyricist, unpretentiously and precisely describing those things worth having even as he casts unsettling shadows across them.”
—Robert Potts, The Guardian