Peace Talks by Andrew Motion, book review: Finding inspiration in nature

As reported in May, Sir Andrew Motion, former poet laureate, has "quit" Britain for the United States saying, at an event at the Imperial War Museum, that he felt "still so hard pressed to the national bosom" that he was "suffocating". Though he still loved England, he wanted the "adventure" a new position in the States offered him.

This substantial new collection from Motion has arrived several months after this move, and three years after The Customs House. It's a book of two distinct parts. The first, "My Own Blue Eye", is where we can find evidence of Motion's yearnings for change, for a fresh start.

There is a real sense in these poems both of a movement back towards something ("sound like water running / backwards to its source/ to start again") and of a keen interest in the environment, both to celebrate and preserve it. In "A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau", a poem of six sections (many of these poems are in fact multi-sectioned expansive pieces), we are told:

"In my absence/I had missed two visitors/or so their footprints told me./One left nothing I could know them by."

The human trace in the natural world is at the centre of Motion's thoughts. In "The Death of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine", Motion writes: "In my final estimation/the mountain looked very/beautiful […]/I can think of no better way to explain/why they chose to stay."

Importantly this is not nature as something deadly, but rather as something enveloping. Nature is what is permanent for Motion, amongst the transiency of humans, their reputations, their sense of self ("So far as I can tell /nothing changed when he went").

Elsewhere in this shifting, diverse first section of the book are high energy poems, experimentations with spacing and lineation which the book blurb itself admits are "new in Motion's work". "A Fight in Poland" and "Laying the Fire", both poems rooted in specific memories, are the strongest of the works on offer.

The second section of the collection continues Motion's project on writing about 20th- and 21st-century wars. Some poems are based on found text, or conversations, and thus lack the musicality and rhythm of the more conventional lyric poems which open the book, though this is surely their point – more straightforward, plainer, and, on the whole, they retain their power because of this. "A Tile from Hiroshima" continues Motion's new confidence in formal playfulness, from exploded lyric verses to prose-poem blocks and shorter bursts of more conventional stanzas, the overall effect is of a scrapbook, of something found and put together, of something collected.

"The Fence", with its subtle allusions to Robert Frost, echoes back to the literary allusions in the first half of the collection; Motion is always in touch with his poetic forefathers, conscious of the historical voices he is in conversation with. In "The Fish in Australia", Motion writes: "Why not, I thought/why not/despite the loss to me/continue standing here/and still cast out my line."

It offers an interesting insight into the whole collection; one of our most renowned poets, seeking fresh waters, casting out his lines and discovering the pleasure, once more, in his craft.

Faber, £14.99. Order at £12.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop