Sleeping on Islands — Andrew Motion reflects on a life in poetry

Some may have been surprised when Andrew Motion became the British poet laureate in 1999 but his second memoir Sleeping on Islands — which he states “concentrates mainly on my life in poetry” — shows how good he has always been at endearing himself to influential people.

When he was a teenager, one of Motion’s teachers introduced him to an antiquarian book dealer who had known Rupert Brooke. For Motion, the son of a Norfolk brewer and freshly intoxicated by reading the first world war poets, this was a thrilling link to great literature. A few years later, while studying at Oxford university, Motion bonded with a living poetic genius when he sat next to WH Auden at a dinner. Auden, who was “the living writer I most admired”, asked to read Motion’s poems (“I must have squeezed in the fact that I wrote them”) and there began a mentorship that is the stuff of a young writer’s dreams.

Motion sees his mother’s accident, which happened when he was 17, as the key event in his life

Things went similarly smoothly when Motion was teaching English at Hull University, where he hit it off with Philip Larkin (“the greatest poet alive”) and, after Larkin’s death in 1985, Motion became the poet’s biographer. Motion claims that he had never considered whether he might be interested in the poet laureateship — the poet appointed by the UK monarch to write verse for national occasions — but when Ted Hughes died in 1998 and the post became vacant, he received a phone call from Downing Street informing him: “The prime minister is of a mind to recommend to the Queen that you be appointed the next poet laureate.”

In reality, having tête-à-têtes with literary giants and casually landing plum jobs (Motion was an editor at Chatto & Windus where he worked with Booker Prize winners) was probably more complicated than Motion makes it sound. There are gaps in his second memoir and Motion acknowledges that it “has a more fragmented form than its predecessor”.

His first memoir, In The Blood (2006), was about his childhood and the moment when his mother was paralysed after falling from her horse. Motion sees his mother’s accident, which happened when he was 17, as the key event in his own life. The most memorable passages in his new memoir concern the years directly afterwards: “It was obvious that my mother’s fall had turned me into a poet, and also obvious that she’d become a kind of black hole that swallowed every other subject I might want to write about.”

His second memoir has plenty of momentum, as you would expect from a writer who has, since his term as laureate ended in 2009, published five collections of new poems, but it loses intensity in the middle when Motion ticks off his careers in publishing and academia. As laureate, Motion did not enjoy writing poems about royal occasions — his rap for Prince William’s 21st birthday was a nadir — but he was pleased to “take up cudgels” on behalf of poetry, visiting schools to show children that it was all around them, and making an archive of recordings of contemporary poets.

Although Sleeping on Islands is ostensibly about Motion’s life in poetry, the source of its emotional power is his realisation in recent years that his relationship with his reticent father was as formative as his mother’s accident. Here, as in his collections Essex Clay (2018) and Randomly Moving Particles (2020), Motion writes about both of his parents with affection and generosity.

Now 70, Motion lives in the US with his third wife Kyeong-Soo Kim. That opportunity was another that presented itself without Motion pursuing it when the poet Mary Jo Salter, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, “took me to supper and asked whether I’d ever think of moving to America and joining her on the teaching staff.” It sounds like nice work if you can get it and a new chapter in the brilliant career of a writer who has always known how to make the right connections.

Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry by Andrew Motion Faber £20, 320 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café