It is over three years since Sir Andrew Motion left the role of Poet Laureate after a decade in the position. In the intervening time, he has not shied away from acknowledging what he sees as a constriction of creativity during his time in office. Describing it as ‘very, very damaging to my work’, Motion speaks candidly of being granted a new lease of poetic life as soon as he relinquished the role. This new collection, however, reads not as the result of a sudden and irresistible creative outpouring – not as Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ - but as the product of a patient search for poetry in the external and the encountered. Many of the poems are what Motion describes as ‘found’, involving the altering, editing and rearranging of existing texts. His method casts the poet as collaborator.

The first section comprises a group of war poems, many of which appeared as the chapbook Laurels and Donkeys in 2010. This series moves from the First World War through the twentieth century to the experiences of soldiers in contemporary conflicts. The sonnet sequence ‘An Equal Voice’ takes as its epigram and motivation a quotation from Ben Shephard’s history of twentieth century military psychology, A War of Nerves. We begin to see each fourteen line arrangement not as Motion’s response to what he has heard and read, but simply as his provision of a frame. The sonnets’ mis-en-page, that compact almost-square, is the instantly recognisable shape within which he has placed the words of others - the war-damaged soldiers who, as Shephard notes, have rarely had ‘an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences’.

Such extended quotation prevents rhyme or notable metrical pattern, and attention is instead drawn to line breaks. A seemingly conclusive end-stopped line is rendered more urgent by the two short phrases which follow it in the next: ‘And all the while fear, crawling into my heart. / I felt it. Crawling into me.’ We are also asked to consider, here and elsewhere in the collection, what it might mean to inhabit someone else’s first-person perspective. The blunt, unmediated voice of an interviewee certainly has the power to shock - ‘his eyes were sunk // and had rolled backwards - there was no brain left in there’ - but the most effective, indeed affective, moments (and sadly they are all too rare) are those in which Motion unabashedly provides a poet’s imaginative or interpretative counterpoint. The devastating explosion of a shell, for example, is ironically prefaced by the cheerful and unthreatening sound which marks the beginning of its descent: ‘A soft siffle, high in the air like a distant lark, / or the note of a penny whistle, faint and falling’.

The best and most memorable of Motion’s war poems are those in which a cynical authorial voice recalls Wilfred Owen in a manner that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is an effect which the concluding lines of ‘The Death of Harry Patch’ seems to gesture towards. Here, the spirit of the last soldier known to have fought in World War One rejoins his company as ‘their padre appears out of nowhere, / pausing a moment in front of each and every one / to slip a wafer of dry mud onto their tongues’.

The collection as a whole is characterised by the historical transcendence established by the war poems. This is a place, as in the poem ‘Laurels and Donkeys’, ‘where the years become confused’, with Motion’s childhood infiltrating his adult mind. But his spare and unadorned style, particularly in ‘A Glass Child’, a poem which remembers an inspirational English teacher, can lead to a frustratingly flat experience. When simile appears, it has a tendency towards the formulaic: snow fall is ‘like thousands of pieces of torn-up paper’. Tellingly, it is only when chronological leaps are abandoned in favour of the spiritual and psychological resonance of a particular place, such as in the section entitled ‘The Exploration of Space’, that Motion’s most distinctive, searching poetry appears.