Andrew Motion’s beautiful yet harrowing prose poem, “Skating” – a recollection of the events surrounding his mother’s riding accident, and the coma from which she never came round – exemplified and went some way towards explaining the poet’s almost hypersensitive susceptibility to grief and pain. His most recent work has tended to focus not only on terrible events, but also on anxieties, memories and dreams, and his narratives have shown an (at times) excruciating empathy with the suffering of their characters. To this extent, The Price of Everything is a further development, and a bold one, of these strategies; in another sense, though, it exposes even the familiar fragmentary narratives to a questioning that verges on despair.
In keeping with a sly ambivalence which riddles the entire book, the volume is divided into two complementary suites of poems and prose fragments. The first section, “Lines of Desire”, takes a moment of random urban violence for its introduction, and the poet’s home in particular as a locus for subsequent meditations; the second, “Joe Soap”, attempts a sweeping historical and geographical survey through the eyes of a ghostly Everyman, doomed to inhabit the precarious lives of the inhabitants of the globe, a suitable metaphor (and vehicle) for the vicarious suffering of Motion’s imaginative sympathy. These two approaches, which overlap at times, maintain a necessary tension between the narratives of individual lives and the larger narratives of war and civilization which threaten to bury them.
Motion likewise adopts a variety of styles to effect the ventriloquism required by this approach. The loosely stressed lyric or elegy familiar from much of his recent work is complemented by striking alternatives. A diabolical employment of ballad-like rhythm, evocative of the march both of armies and of more inexorable forces, vies with song-like apostrophes; a prose of child-like candour is soured by unblinking discoveries of horror; a modest, pragmatic language, artfully squeezing resonance from cliché, bursts into vivid, pin-point description, delicate epiphany or indelicate outrage. Constantly juxtaposing first and third-person narratives, Motion shuttles carefully between omniscience and specificity.
Amidst these dispossessed voices, the home-building of the first sequence (in which home is a symbol of consolation and retreat, embodied specifically in the form of a loved one) is undermined by the irresistible financial demands which both shape and threaten it, and the fear of its collapse. The attack on the poet drives him to his sleeping wife, and to his study underground, with a fresh sense of frailty; “The fire is out at the heart of the world / all the tame creatures have grown up wild // The lives I trusted, even my own / collapse, break off, or don’t belong.” Later, the roof over Motion’s head, an emblem of belonging and protection, becomes terrifyingly unstable; it threatens to collapse under the weight of history or the violent games of those tame creatures, his children; it is also represented as “a roof / of paper money the slightest breeze / might blow into space”. The context for family and house is a narrative embracing two world wars and the parallel narrative of financial developments. These narratives and topographies collapse into each other so startlingly at times (a pastoral reminiscent of Essex becoming a northern French battle-ground, for example) that the reader is similarly denied the certainty of place.
The second sequence shimmies with similar manoeuvres, but more radically; its final apocalyptic visions come from an anonymous addressee gazing through the slit of a pill-box at a refugee world; the narrator himself is more dramatically homeless, passing through the lives and minds of a universe of victims, “never again as myself”. In John Wain’s poem “Poem”, the impotent eye of a god is imagined, helplessly seeing all human pain; Wain concludes, “He has no ignorance to keep him separate. / The gods know everything. The gods are desperate.” Wain’s examples of human suffering are banal compared to Motion’s war-photographs; but the stance is comparable. Motion, piling horror on horror, has no direct experience of many of the atrocities he describes; but throughout the volume he honestly inscribes the sources of information which bring other lives to our attention; the newspapers, television, history books, even the satellites which can home in on an eyeball.
That last example is Motion’s own; in a similarly striking vignette, he channel-hops through atrocity until, on the blank screen, he discerns the reflection of himself, his wife and his child. Just as the outside world penetrates his shrinking living-space, threatening his integrity, so too could the situation reverse, the household becoming another piece of tragic reportage. Typically, Motion’s symbols remain cunningly ambivalent; his vision of his wife “at liberty in the clear water of [her] own life”, confusingly rises towards him through his own reflection. In the telescoping oscillations with which Motion manipulates time and space, transience and dispossession, he constantly calls attention to his individuality, or to threats to it; when he writes, of a childhood incident, “My life was mine. My life was everything”, he echoes harsh examples of a struggle for survival even as he concedes the limits of his subjectivity.
That conflict can cause such dispossession, can strike at the heart of the home against which individuals define themselves, is again handled in two distinct ways. The first posits a more suspect, lapsarian narrative, in which something can be, and has been, lost, whether in the Edenic references to his parents stepping out, or the starker observations of the nomadic, clutching their keepsakes; “they love each other . . . they have to since they lost so much at once; / each other’s lives are all they’ve got left”. Sequences beginning “it starts like this”, plotting the transformation of labour into luxury or the development of a dangerous civilization, emphasize such a faith. At times these meditations seem too huge to depend on the assault which ostensibly triggers them; one is reminded of Geoffrey Hill’s carefully ambiguous lines in “September Song”: “I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true”.
Yet Motion intelligently denies even the tenability of this (literally) self-serving consolation, in passages which assault the redeeming power of narrative and even language; the words “parents, women, streets, parks . . . just lie there. / They never become a story.” This failure of a “big language”, dreamed of in the apparent success of the 1945 peace, is indicated elsewhere by the juddering collapse of narrative into skeletal tercets, stripped of all but their rhythms and final rhymes, suggestive of any story or none at all.
Peace, in these poems, whether the peace of mind required by the narrator of the first section, or a global peace denied the narrator of the second, can only be dreamed of, although the aphorism from Wilde alluded to in the title suggests both cynicism and an appreciation of value beyond the material; both main narratives are left poised, beyond certain judgment. Motion, even in his occasional and sinister chanting of archetypes, fights shy of polemic, offering instead a fraught capriccio of lyric, elegy, reportage and vision. The ambitious architecture becomes apparent only slowly; but this is a courageous performance, unflinching in its grief and outrage while rarely raising its voice, eschewing easy positions at every turn, capable of a desperate integrity even as it tears itself apart.