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The Customs House

‘The Customs House’ (Faber, 2012) is Motion’s eleventh collection of poems and divided into three sections. The first is a group of poems called ‘Laurels and Donkeys’ that tackles the theme of c20 Western wars – from the First World War to Afghanistan. Many of these poems use ‘found’ material: books, newspaper articles and interviews that Motion conducted himself with soldiers and their widows. Motion negotiates a series of poems in relation to existing ‘war poetry’, to find a way of writing war poetry as a non-combatant that avoids authorial grandstanding. Several of these poems are now being set to music, to make a new War Requiem that has been commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra with music by Sally Beamish for performance in the Barbican and elsewhere in November 2014.

The second part of the book contains a series of poems about ‘place’ (they are all named after and set in particular locations), which seek to turn simple evocation into a more prolonged search for and meditation on belonging. The third part of the book is concerned in one way or another with our consciousness as a species of living in time – elegies, poems about the environment, poems about vanished historical figures. Here as elsewhere Motion engages an awareness of writing within the ‘English line’ of lyric poets.