In the blood : a memoir of my childhood / Andrew Motion.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Motion, Andrew, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion, Andrew, 1952---Childhood and youth.

Motion, Andrew.

Motion, Andrew, 1952-.

Poets, English--20th century--Biography.

Poets, English.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

326 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston : David R. Godine, [2007]

Summary:

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 p?an to his family, and the secret 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 ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and 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.

Contents:

Essex plough

Was he dead?

Eggs

Little brewers

Close fielding

A over T

In the wood

The glass door

Running and sliding

The Swish

The gate and the shadow

Condensed milk

Bellum, bellum, bellum

Beauty

The cliffs of America

Going beetroot

Wooooooogh!

No talking

Yellow

Wasting skin

The ashground

Shut-eye.

Notes:

Originally published: Great Britain : Faber and Faber, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781567923391

1567923399

OCLC:

156815159