RESULTS

Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property  in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens. The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities. Here are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of the poet's father.

Dr Cake is an unexceptional man. After a period of study and practice in London and several years spent travelling in Europe, he has chosen the life of a village doctor and lives quietly and alone. Why then, on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin-lid, is there no name?

This book consists of two long poems. 'Lines of Desire' tells the story of an individual in crisis, under cruel pressure both from past and present events. 'Joe Soap' combines narrative and lyric forms to trace a historical pattern reaching from the First World War to contemporary apocalypse. Andrew Motion has won the Somerset Maugham Award for achievements both as a poet and a biographer.

A collection of poems featuring Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Napoleon and Linford Christie, and topics such as a child being stung in the eye by a wasp, and a glass being flung experimentally out a window.

The author evokes Wainewright the poisoner's double life in a biography that takes the form of a confession. He strips away the layers of legend and restores Wainewright to his own voice, capturing his energy, charm, callousness, wit and wantoness.

The First World War produced some of the most haunting and memorable poetry of our age. In this compelling anthology, the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion guides us through both the horror and the pity of that conflict, from the trenches of the Western Front to reflections from our own age. With a selection of our best-known war poets, this collection also returns lesser known pieces to the light and extends the selection right through to the present day. The text serves to remind us how poetry of that time has, more than any other art form, come to stand testament to the grief and outrage occasioned by World War I.