University of Pittsburgh Press
Gravity Archives
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Gravity Archives

Poems: Expanded Edition

By Andrew Motion
Syntax powers the contemporary poetry I most love—it is via surprising syntactical arrangements that poems flash toward newness, word by word. In Gravity Archives, Andrew Motion does countless things brilliantly, but it is with his electrifying syntax that he creates newness and suspends his readers in its midst, wide-eyed at the shock and joy of it.
Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell: A Poem
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Shortlisted for the 2026 T.S. Eliot Prize

Andrew Motion’s new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the long title sequence which completes the book, he explores the ways in which regrets compete with hope, and the appetite for life is always a prey to hard facts of mortality. The energy and reach of these poems opens a new chapter in Motion’s writing, remaining true to the elegiac subjects which have always been his main concern, while adding new depths of pathos and resonance.

Gravity Archives has been expanded for the North American edition in the Pitt Poetry Series; it contains several new lyrics in the opening part of the book, and two new sections have been added to the long title poem.

More Praise

Praise for the UK edition: While modern poetry is increasingly packed with experimental pyrotechnics, Motion turns to the quiet embers of poetic thought.... His attentive approach to an older school of poetry brings comfort amid the exhausting changes of the present. At 73, Motion achieves new depths of pathos, and unlikely sources of hope. (Review of the UK Edition.)

The Guardian

152 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

March, 2027

isbn : 9780822968764

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about the author

Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion is professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorized life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Motion was knighted in the United Kingdom for his services to poetry in 2009.

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Andrew Motion