In his poem 'Talking in Bed', Philip Larkin, with typical melancholic realism, dwells on the way lovers at their most intimate often struggle for things to say, searching for "Words at once true and kind,/ Or not untrue and not unkind."
Such rhetorical doubling-back deepens a poem that otherwise bathes in a strain of English pessimism - clear-eyed, always just the wrong side of negative - entirely dominant in Public Property, a new collection by Larkin's one-time biographer, the current poet laureate, Andrew Motion.Specialising in poems neither untrue nor unkind has qualified Motion to be perhaps the only kind of credible laureate - a not unpoetic one - and this studiously nondescript collection is divided between carefully inoffensive poems on public subjects (including elegies for Diana and the Queen Mother) and inoffensively careful poems dealing with his own upbringing.
Among the many shades visited in the book is Ted Hughes, a friend of Motion, and his immediate predecessor as laureate. Public Property includes a prose reminiscence dedicated to Hughes and devoted to one of his favourite occupations: fly-fishing. It includes some passages which show Motion at his descriptive best:
"The gorgeous taut fish was assembling itself from the broken pieces of the world - gravel, wind, water, sun. It was fixing its bony mind on death and rising towards me steadily."
The piscine reference is deliberate, one of a number featured here. Motion, following Hughes, likes to conceive of the monarchy as Necessity, as a kind of pastoral apotheosis with almost telepathic connections to the English countryside. His elegy for the Queen Mother, 'Remember This', for example, juxtaposes blandly phrased regret (". . . we're honouring a time/ that simply as a fact of time/ could only end . . .") with soft-focus imagery of various creatures in a state of happy determinism: horses, trees and "a homecoming salmon" with nothing to "pull out of true/ the course of its mind". The implied, strangely medieval message is of a monarchy as natural and benevolent as the sun.
Ultimately, though, the message of these poems matters far less than their tone: a low ruminative Anglican hum as fundamentally English as its contemporary forms of expression - from the shipping forecast to Test Match Special, from cartoon vicars to Blair in excelsis. On the surface, Public Property is an elegy for England; deep down, it is an elegy for the elegiac. When Motion starts 'In Memory of Mervyn Dalley' with the lines "I was going to quote whoever it was said/ It was your last afternoon as yourself", the quote (from Auden's elegy for Yeats) shows nostalgia for an elegiac model, national and public, no longer quite plausible. It indicates, too, how much the book echoes other (mostly) English poets - Auden, Edward Thomas (subject of a Motion critical study), Heaney and, above all, Larkin. By describing the Queen Mother's devotion to duty in terms of "the persistence of love", for example, Motion recalls the famous final line of Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb': "What will survive of us is love". What Motion misses, however, here and elsewhere, is the essential doubling-back - the way Larkin qualifies his line by calling it "Our almost-instinct almost-true". Motion's line is meant straight.
Public Property. By Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber, 102 pp. £12.99 sterling