Clive James: New Poetry Book & Life Update

With the release of Sentenced to Life, a new poetry book by Clive James, there’s been a burst of publicity, in summa mode, recounting his career, particularly his brilliant essays and later poetry.

I’m an avid reader of all his books. Two recent articles offer a good perspective on his current state of health and his life. He suffers from an assortment of chronic ailments, and many premature articles have all but announced his impending death. Thankfully, his recent books show he’s still creating art, and he has other books in the works. His lifestyle appears to be not all that dire.

See this article for a revealing recap of his past four years, and this article, for a view of James by his daughter, who lives nearby James’s own home in Cambridge. His estranged wife also lives nearby, and it appears that she and her daughter are giving James good support, despite his self-proclaimed breach of faith with his wife.

Many of the poems in his new book go to the heart of the pain he publicly caused his wife and daughter, and his great remorse. His incisive friend, the playwright Tom Stoppard, offers a fulsome dissection of James’s compelling voice as a writer and a critical assessment of his later poetry. James is one of the premier essayists of our time, and a recent collection Cultural Amnesia, should be required reading by aspiring journalists, critics and anyone interested in the 20^th century.

To hear James read his poem Early to Bed, go here. He also reads his poem Japanese Maple in the first profile article. Don’t miss it…

James Evans Sees His Masterpiece

A Javelina at Night                                                                            Photograph copyright James Evans

James Evans has completed a series of photographs, called the Ranch Project, that are a testament to his beloved Big Bend area of desert and mountains in far West Texas. Working from his home in Marathon, a small crossroads town, Evans has risen to a new level of personal vision, revealing his inner eye and heart through his photographs of the land and the animals who live there. It is a vision of the natural world in dream-like images of the beauty and mystery that surrounds us and yet remains untouchable. To see a story about the project, go here. To see his website and hundreds of his photographs, go here.

Clive James’ Recent Poems

I’m always touched by Clive James’ essays, and his many books and poems. He’s a writer to read for a broad perspective on our world. Recently, his illness has forced him to concentrate more on his poetry. His latest work is a summing up, marked by thoughts of deep regret and death. The regret is the most tragic kind, involving affairs of the heart and the ending of close relationships. This is the last stanza of a recent, long poem, Rounded With A Sleep, which you can read here.

“All day tomorrow I have tests and scans/ And everything that happens will be real. / My blood might say I should make no more plans, / And when it does so, that will be the deal. /  But until then I love to speak with you / Each day we meet. / Sometimes we even touch / Across the sad gulf that I brought us to. / Just for a time, so little means so much: / More than I’m worth, I know, as I know how / My death is something I must live with now.”

New Harrison essay

Jim Harrison has a new novella, The River Swimmer, to be released in January, while at the same time he is experiencing a series of health issues that he writes about extensively in this essay in Brick magazine.

Difficult poetry

So-called difficult poetry has become my touchstone lately; poetry by William Empson, who seems a bit akin to Wittgenstein because of his elliptical nature; Wallace Stevens, who many people say is difficult but who seems very open to me; and Philip Larkin, for his lack of brio and his entrapment of the mundane in elegant verse. Larkin’s acceptance by the British people says a lot about the poetry of ideas, such as Stevens’, versus Larkin’s withering honesty about the grinding futility of most people’s lives, that inevitable sense of flatness that replaces the glow of the future, faith, hope and belief while people slide into old age and death. Larkin and Stevens are opposites (except in craft). Larkin leaves you with only a stripped-down self, while Stevens leaves you inside a romance, though it must be self-sustaining. For the difference, see below Larkin and Stevens….

Here is early Larkin from his youth, in The North Ship:

XXVI

This  is the first thing

I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood

Also, see the Stevens excerpt below this….