Essex Clay
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By Sir Andrew Motion
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1 review
Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. Essex Clay is a biography told in three poems. The poems cover painful topics such as love, family and loss.
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An absorbing read, particularly Part 1. The book reveals the feelings and thoughts of a child’s life, which is buffeted by his mother’s accident and its consequences, including everyone’s reaction to it. You really get a strong sense of Andrew Motion’s life being ‘before’ and ‘after’ the accident. Wonderfully written.
The 2nd and 3rd parts were also a pleasure to read but, perhaps understandably, were not so emotionally driven, resulting in a greater sense of detachment for the reader. It was clever to round off the book by going back to the beginning and meeting up again with Juliet even if we, as the readers, were not too emotionally bound to her.
Overall, the book was a little unbalanced but an excellent read.
