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The Cinder Path

‘The Cinder Path’ (Faber, 2009) is a collection of lyric poems written during the last half of Motion’s time as Poet Laureate (1999-2009), and contains mainly poems that were written away from the public eye – poems made of childhood memories, of contemporary observations, and sometimes of ‘found’ texts that Motion worked into shapes and terms of his own. In this sense the ‘research’ that went into the book is made of two kinds: Motion’s own experience, and his reading – of for instance the letters of William Cowper, James Farrar’s war memoir ‘The Unreturning Spring’, and W. N. P. Barbellion’s ‘Journal of a Disappointed Man’, all of which are used as the foundation stones for poems. At the heart of the book stands a group of loosely-linked poems about the death of Motion’s father. Motion was conscious of working within a distinct tradition of elegiac verse.