Andrew Motion's Waders is coming soon. A keen recorder of how it feels now, in this instant, to be alive.

Waders, the brilliant and shimmering new collection from former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion is coming in just one month. As the books release moves ever closer, we wanted to share a taste of the work with our readers.

Read on for the works title poem, reproduced in full, and preorder Waders today (available May 28 wherever books are sold).

1.

In days that follow, when the summer brings
slow afternoons with nothing left to do,
I take what used to be your garden chair
and park it underneath the wayward ash
elbowing forward where the garden swerves
to hide the house from view. In secret then
I conjure up the notebook I have found
among your bedside things and open it
Blank pages. Thoughts you never had. Or had
but could not bring yourself to say. Should I
imagine them or write my own instead?
I close my eyes and scrutinize the white
that also lies inside me while the ash
rattles its pale green keys above my head.


2.

The milk float with its thin mosquito whine
straining through larch and elder from the lane,
the nervous bottles in their metal basket
intent on music but without a tune,
the milkman in his doctors grubby coat
and sailors rakish dark blue canvas cap,
are all invisible, imagined/dreamed
beyond my curtains in the early light,
along with tissue footprints in the frost,
our rinsed-out empties, and the rolled-up note
exchanged for bottles with their silver tops
the blue tits have already broken through
to sip the stiffened plugs of cream before
we come downstairs and bring our order in.


3.

To think the world is endless, prodigal,
to part the hedgerow-leaves and see the eggs
like planets in a crowded galaxy,
to hear my mothers voice advising me
the mother-bird herself will never mind
if I take only one and leave the rest,
means nothing more than showing interest.
As does the careful slow walk home, the ritual
of pinpricks through both ends, the steady breath
that blows the yolk and albumen clean out
but keeps the pretty shell intact, the nest
of crumpled paper in the cedar drawer,
the darkness falling then, the hush, and me
bringing the weight of my warm mind to bear.


4.

Before our time they used my room to store
apples collected from those crooked trees
now wading waist deep at the garden end
in frilly white-capped waves of cow parsley,
and laid them out in rows not touching quite.
I guess all this because the floorboards show
wherever they had missed one as it turned
to mush that sank a stain into the wood.
My bed stands over them and when at night
my eyes grow used to darkness they appear:
the Coxes, Bramleys, Blenheim Oranges
whose names alone can fill the empty air
with branches weighted down by next years crop
that turn its scent half-cloying and half-sweet.


5.

I try my fathers waders on for size
then take, with him encouraging, his rod
and wading stick, his canvas bag, his cap
rigid beneath its crown of favorite flies,
and step into the river. From the bank
he says I look like him. As for myself
I only think of how to stand upright
with water hardening one second round
my ankles, and the next uprooting me
as though I have no purchase on the world.
My father shouts, Dont fight it. I obey.
I let the deluge settle round my heart
then lay me on my back to carry me
round the long sweep beyond my fathers sight.


6.

That roofless kennel where the nettles shake
their fine-haired leaves and tiny tight green buds
That almost-buried path of blood-red bricks
where ivy scrawls across its own designs.
That ruined square of cracked disrupted blocks
where once a summer house turned round and stared.
These were the former glories of the house
although I like their fall and brokenness
much more than grieving for a time I missed.
As also I like walking with the ghosts
that wander through the garden everywhere
the mother and her son whose footsteps leave
no prints beside us in the grass as though
our selves are all the company we keep.