India, July 16 -- Most reviews of Andrew Motion's Gravity Archives have understandably settled under the familiar labels. Britain's former Poet Laureate remains, they argue, the country's foremost elegist, still charting grief, mortality, and the attributes of ageing. Others have read the collection through the lens of his move to Baltimore, seeing these poems as nostalgic returns to London. Both observations are true, but they stop short of the collection's more unsettling achievement. Gravity Archives is not primarily a book about death or exile. It is about the gradual archiving of the self. Which raises two larger questions: What is this gravity? And what exactly are these archives?

An archive is an unusual metaphor. It is not where ...