• Andrew Motion
  (author)
• Faber & Faber , 2026
• Purchase Online

From the former Poet Laureate, a remarkable contemplation of departure and return, and remembering other selves and people now out of reach.

Andrew Motion’s new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the long title sequence which completes the book, he explores the ways in which regrets compete with hope, and the appetite for life is always a prey to hard facts of mortality. The energy and reach of these poems opens a new chapter in Motion’s writing, remaining true to the elegiac subjects which have always been his main concern, while adding new depths of pathos and resonance.

Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive, and has written acclaimed biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats among others. His memoir of childhood, In the Blood, was published in 2006, and its sequel, Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry, appeared alongside Selected Poems: 1977-2022 in 2023. He is Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.

“From his 1978 debut through his laureate elegies for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, death remains a major preoccupation for Motion. And for good reason: his mother’s accidental fall from a horse and subsequent premature death catalysed an unshakeable elegiac pattern, the poet as chronicler of loss – and, by extension, love. But something has subtly shifted in this latest gravitational turn. No longer the bewildered and ambivalent Englishman, who in his previous book, Randomly Moving Particles, emigrates to the US, here we see a more rooted and resolute eye surveying the mortality of others as well as his own.” – Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian, ‘The best recent poetry’