In “Gravity Archives,” a new long poem, Andrew Motion sorts through his personal past while charting the ongoing present with its fluctuating moods, obsessive memories, and fleeting observations, almost in the manner of a diary. The poems here follow Motion on a return to England, his native country, from the United States, where he lives now.
The central motif is gravity. That includes everything that weighs on us and threatens to pull us down or back into the past. Motion gives us multiple images of “falling,” starting with his redeye arrival in London, where the morning light is “catastrophic” (a Greek word meaning a sudden fall or “downturn”). Parakeets in the trees and a fox on the street: these familiar sights from North London remind Motion of “love’s labour lost.” It was here, he reflects, that “I crashed my life.”
At Tate Britain, Motion “stumbles on” A Picture of a Man Who Suddenly Fell Over, a work from 1952 by the English painter Michael Andrews. A bald, well-dressed gentleman, who has perhaps stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk, floats horizontal over the “cold grey stones” into which he will presently slam, while his wife (Motion speculates) looks on “aghast.” The image suggests what it is like to take a fall—or slip up in a marriage?—“without banana skins / or trip wire, or another human foot to blame.” The man’s foolish smile “reveals the shame” of a self-created calamity, which is doubly painful for being public.
Motion’s return to England prompts memories of other falls involving his family. He recalls climbing a tree in childhood and turning around too late to keep his younger brother from falling. In another poem, he remembers an accident that reshaped his life. When he was 17, Motion’s mother fell from her horse on a fox hunt, suffered a severe head injury, and entered a coma. She regained consciousness for periods after that but was paralyzed and spoke with difficulty for the rest of her life. Motion has often revisited that accident in poetry and prose and does so again here. But this time, he invokes his mother only to banish her from his poetry for good, telling her to “be gone.” Cutting himself “free” will mean “never coming home again.”
Motion is a writer noted for clarity and elegance. But his style in “Gravity Archives” is rougher than usual, his syntax expressively off-kilter. That keeps the feeling raw and immediate and gives the impression of poetry in search of its proper form, although each of these poems is artfully shaped according to the same simple template: four tercets of loose unrhymed iambic lines.
Threaded through “Gravity Archives” are poems that address John Berryman, whose 77 Dream Songs is one of Motion’s models. Berryman—who died by suicide when he jumped from a bridge, letting gravity do its work—is a tragic guide charging Motion to “speak up” and face the fact that “[h]ere is what is and where only you are.”
This is the same wisdom Motion arrives at when he pushes the ghost of his mother away, into a past he no longer can or wishes to hold onto, and decides, “High time / it is that I like everyone set out to die alone.”
