[Andrew Motion] is unhesitating in his reservations about contemporary politics and climate change, but the primacy of his craft in poetry is never in question. 'Here I am corrupt yet become unearthly innocent' this, one of the many aphorisms that populate the volume, ably stands for the open, despairing, tenacious figure of the poet.-- "Library Journal, starred review"
Motion offers an ambitious and engaging inquiry into mortality, politics, and place.-- "Publishers Weekly"
Past Praise for Andrew Motion: Motion shows new confidence in formal playfulness, from exploded lyric verses to prose-poem blocks and shorter bursts of more conventional stanzas.-- "Independent"
Past Praise for Andrew Motion: There is an equally journalistic tone to much of Motion's war poetry, a like fascination with the smallest detail, the observed, ordinarily missable, fleeting thing. Many of the poems are 'found, ' repurposed prose and speech; dialogue and utterance stand in for performed, foregrounded craft, and are all the more affecting for their hesitations, stutters, and colloquial slips.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"