Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
William Faulkner's character Quentin in The Sound and the Fury repeatedly observes that temporary is the saddest word of all. Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of British Poet Laureate Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A paeam to hisfamily, and the secreta hollows of his beloved home, this memoir evokes a whole world long disappeared. The book begins in December of 1968, hours before his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. This memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the eluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral substance of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost.
Synopsis
Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of this memoir of childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England.
Synopsis
Eschewing the confessional or critical tone of some memoirs, and the investigatory or elucidatory approaches of others, Motion strives to recreate the voice and vision of the boy he once was, taking care not to sully or distort with hindsight what is felt to be still very much alive in memory. Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing in Scotland with his father, the horrors of prep school at the young age of seven, or his discovery of Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues his recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he will be; readers of Motion's poetry will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," as in the book's title and epigraph from Wordsworth, can be neither taken from us nor los