Andrew Motions new book opens with a sequence of war poems (first published as the pamphlet Laurels & Donkeys" on Armistice Day 2010) drawing on soldiers experiences of war from 1914 until today
- beginning with a story about Siegfried Sassoon & moving via World War Two & Korea to the recent conflicts in Iraq & Afghanistan. Many of the poems are in the voices of combatants others are based on memories of the poets father who landed at D-day & fought in France & Germany. The poems combine understatement with a clear-eyed & unswerving candor. " The Customs House" has other rooms: a group of topographies mapping moments in a marriage against the contingencies of place & family history; & several found poems in which the poet collaborates with his source mixing what is there already with what is about to be there: whether a remarkable sonnet sequence on the last days of the Baroque genius Francesco Borromini or in other poems a richly imagined extrapolation from the silent premises of a painting."