This comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motion's distinguished body of work from Secret Narratives (1983) to his most recent volume, Randomly Moving Particles (2020), and includes a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems.Certain preoccupations unite the book, which from first to last is particularly concerned with the ways in which our lives are shaped by loss - by wars, by accidents, by the erosions of time and by grief. But as a poet Motion is also an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while the shapes and voices of the poems mostly prove this by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and collaborate with documentary sources. In either case, and especially movingly in the long poem 'Essex Clay', Motion uses acts of personal witness to reflect the vulnerabilities of the world at large.These are extraordinary poems of and for our times, enlarging our sense of the cost of human experience even as they refine those sensibilities that keep us most alive and engaged with the present. 'Andrew Motion is one of the essential English poets of our time.' John Burnside'Motion's greatest and most distinctive gift . . . is to look squarely at the world and describe it with a plain and unsentimental eloquence that makes worldly value seem all the more questionable.' Bernard O'Donoghue, Independent on Sunday