Books by Sir Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens.

The outline of the story is well known - has become, in fact, the stuff of legend: the archetypal life of the tortured genius, critically spurned and dying young. What Andrew Motion brings to bear on the subject is a deep understanding of how Keats fitted into the intellectual and political life of his time.

Philip Larkin, known to many through his poems, contrived to present to the world a picture of himself which kept many facets of his complicated personality hidden. This biography is written by Larkin's literary executor and close friend, Andrew Morton.

Andrew Motion's prose memoir In the Blood (2006) was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval and a hymn to familial love. Now, twelve years later and three years after moving to live and work in the United States, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel - but this time in verse.

Depicting the ravages of modern warfare through reported speech, redacted documents, and vivid evocations of place, this book includes poems that are moving and measured, delicate and clear-eyed, and bear witness to the futility of war and the suffering of those left behind.

Andrew Motion's new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels and Donkeys, on Armistice Day 2010), drawing on soldiers' experiences of war from 1914 until today - beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon and moving via World War Two and Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This volume brings together two long poems. 'Lines of Desire' tells the story of an individual in crisis, under pressure from past and present events. 'Joe Soap' combines narrative and lyric forms to trace a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary apocalypse. Both are remarkable additions to an important body of work.

A story of three generations destroyed by drink, drugs and bohemian life. George Lambert served as a war artist in Palestine and Gallipoli, and became Australia's leading painter. His son Constant founded the Sadlers Wells ballet, and Kit Lambert managed the pop group, The Who, and was murdered.

A rich spectrum of poetic voices - ancient and modern, new and familiar - arranged concentrically under different headings: Self, Home, Town, Work, Land, Love, Travel, War, Belief and Space.

In the Blood is Andrew Motion's beautifully written memoir of growing up in post-war England - an unforgettable evocation of family life, school life and country life.

William Barnes was born in 1801 near Sturminster Newton in Dorset, of a farming family. He learned Greek, Latin and Music, taught himself wood-engraving, and in 1823 became a schoolmaster in Mere. Among his best-known books of poetry are "Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect" (1844) and "Hwomely Rhymes" (1859).

What is the truth about the mysterious Dr Cake? Why, at his funeral, is there no name on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin-lid? Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, has written a tantalising novel about poets and their afterlife.