The Price of Everything

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. He is the author of "Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life".