Product Description

Since becoming Poet Laureate in 1999, Andrew Motion has been tireless in his efforts to raise the profile of poetry. In this wonderful new anthology, he has brought together an extraordinary range of poems, exemplifying his belief that, if we let it, poetry has a unique power to enrich our lives as it diversifies them. The poems are arranged in a series of ten concentric rings: Self, Home, Town, Work, Land, Love, Travel, War, Belief and Space. Each section is distinct, but seeks out resemblances and echoes elsewhere, creating the impression of an endlessly expanding universe. From Wallace Stevens to Stevie Smith, Joseph Brodsky to Jo Shapcott, Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas, Ben Jonson to Benjamin Zephaniah, Here to Eternity provides a perfect introduction for new readers and offers surprising connections and revelations to those who are already well-versed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #402566 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
Our current Poet Laureate has always taken seriously his ex-officio responsibilities as an educator, and this copious selection, unbounded in time and space (but with an understandable leaning toward Britain and the 20th century), exemplifies his sense of public purpose. There's a dazzling wealth of imagination here - Wordsworth, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lowell, Amichai, Plath, Hardy, Yeats, Heaney, MacNeice, Cavafy, Neruda, Celan, Hughes, Donne, Pound, Marvell and Burns, to name but a few at random (unchronologically, as the book presents them). The problem is that there's no connection between them other than the selector's sensibility, and this makes the book hard to get to grips with. Motion has had a clever, simple, populist idea: to structure the poems concentrically, progressing from Self to Home to Town to Land to Work to Love to Travel to War to Belief to Space. Such thematic clarity enables Motion to set up some interesting conversations between adjacent poets, but also results in regrettable curiosities of selection: T.S. Eliot crops up three times but there's nothing from The Waste Land; Basil Bunting warrants a cheap satirical poem but nothing from Briggflatts; Wallace Stevens, one of the most challenging writers of the century, has to be content with the bantamweight Anecdote of the Jar. In part such oddities may result from a penchant for the explicable and the accessible. There are gems aplenty, though it's difficult to prize them out of their unflattering setting. There are fine pieces by living writers (especially British and Irish) who deserve to be better known, such as Mick Imlah, Bernard O'Donaghue and Medbh McGuckian. There's a song lyric by Bob Dylan (surely one of his worst). And there is much that has been deadened by overexposure elsewhere (perhaps the only way to revivify such poems is to see them in a less general context). A granary of wheat and chaff, more didactic than inspiring, but worthwhile if it makes a thousand new converts to poetry, as it might. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Andrew Motion was born in 1952 and educated at University College, Oxford. As poet and biographer he has received many prizes and awards, including the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Award. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. In 1999 he was appointed Poet Laureate.

Customer Reviews

A jorney to outer space, accompanied by a martian and a reaper
I dip in and out of this book quite regularly, looking for poems I might have missed, looking for poems in forms I'm trying to write in, and I continue to find little gems.

Those people who don't like Motions own poetry need not worry about buying this book, because there are no works by him.

There are 10 sections, which he's called ten rings, echoing out, expanding, but maintaining a theme. They are: Self, Home, Town, Land, Work, Love, Travel, War, Belief, and Space. So from Louis MacNeice's Prayer before Birth to Henry Vaughan's The World. He's restricted the sections so that a poet would not have more than 1 poem in each section, and no poet has more than 5 entries (except that old joker Anonymous).

Some of my favorite poets are here, like Plath, Heaney, Blake, and of course the big man, WS. But thankfully the anthology is not overrun with people like WS and Wordsworth, like so many anthologies are, because he's restricted them. There are ALOT of poets put into this anthology, which many anthologies don't bother with because they're not big names. But for readers of poetry who get bored of the same old stuff, there's new life in this one.

I've been pleased with this treasure trove anthology and it will certainly be on my shelf for many years to come.