In the Blood

by Motion, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9781567923957
• ISBN10: 156792395X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-05-30
• Publisher: David R Godine Pub

Summary

Despair over the temporariness of the human condition and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, is at the heart of British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A paean to his family and to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with clarity, detail, and care a whole world that has past. The book begins in the present tense in December 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion's desire to capture and keep unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. "My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day," writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes." Eschewing the confessional or critical tone of some memoirs, 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.