From the appearance of his first full-length book, The Pleasure Steamers (1978), Andrew Motion has been counted among the most gifted poets of his generation. The award of the much-publicized Arvon/Observer Poetry Prize in 1981 (for "The Letter," included in Secret Narratives), and his editorship with Blake Morrison of a controversial anthology, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, in 1982 have kept his name before the reading public. Yet his poetry--like its author--is characterized by elusiveness and reticence, a withholding of information.

Nevertheless, Motion has provided a memoir of his childhood and youth that gives insight into the experiences and background on which some of the poetry draws. Andrew Peter Motion was born in London in 1952, the elder of two sons of a brewer. The family moved when he was small to "a dark Victorian warren called Little Brewers, which was apt ... near unspoilt country, and we led what...