In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood

This quiet, sad memoir penned by Andrew Motion, Britain's Poet Laureate from 1999-2009 is full of what Wordsworth called "the still, sad music of humanity." There is none of the garish "redemption" to which we have become accustomed in this "age of memoir." Rather, it is an at times Stoic, at times lyrical account of the fleeting, fragile nature of human life: In particular, the life of the poet's mother. His mother - unlike the "professional" reviewers would have you believe, mine is the first "amateur" one - did not suddenly fall into a coma after a horse-riding accident, but, rather, had been sickly all of Andrew's life after contracting brucellosis and losing a kidney. The memoir moves at a stately, heart-wrenching, measured pace, and we come to know the entire Motion family: The reserved father, the younger brother, Andrew himself, and, of course, his mother. We grow up with Andrew, twigging what he can of the world he inhabits as he comes of age, and his relations with the rest of his nuclear family, with nature, with school and beyond. It is divided into chapters whose title is a phrase Motion remembers using or having heard that brings to life a whole series of events from his lost past. Sometimes these end in deft, poetic thunderbolts: "When I got out of bed and opened the curtains to look to the Tree of Heaven, smashed bits of light were spreading across the lawn like a disaster." And all the while Andrew is maturing, he intuits his sprightly, literary, poetic mother's slow physical disintegration in various ways. It is this slow, mysterious decay of a loved one - which, barring some sort of completely abrupt accident, is how most of us experience life, and death - that makes this memoir so, by turns, lovely, sad, disquieting and uniquely powerful. I have not much more to add. Save perhaps a mental image Motion retains of his thinning mother leaving his bedroom the night before he is sent off to the inevitable boarding school: "She got to her feet at once, and when she sidestepped into the bright landing it looked as though the light was solid, like a sheet, so she disappeared as soon as she reached it."