The multi-talented and sometimes curmudgeonly Australian-British journalist, critic and poet Clive James (Cultural Amnesia), now 75, is dying. He has leukemia and says that he's embarrassed to still be here. But it has given him time to write some more poems and pull together this personal Poetry Notebook, a collection of reflective pieces he has written over the last decade, most for Poetry magazine.
James has always been a lover of poetry, works that have the "intensity of language that marked the real difference between poetry and prose." These short pieces revisit the poets he has loved most; those he once loved (Ezra Pound and his Cantos--a "nut-job blog before the fact"); and those he doesn't much like--he's a stickler for form, meter and rhyme, and he doesn't think a bunch of loose thoughts on a page equal poetic "intensity."
He writes with enthusiasm about his favorites--Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur, Larkin--and his favorite poems, like Yeats's "All Soul's Night," "one of the greatest poems written in the 20th century." Here, too, are takes on some fine poets who aren't household names: Louis MacNeice, Les Murray, Michael Longley and Stephen Edgar ("sheerly beautiful"). And a tip of his hat to John Updike's verse, mostly light but "dauntingly accomplished."
Included are many "Interludes," entertaining brief updates where James can criticize his past self. And throughout, James the book lover comments on the tactile pleasure of holding and reading from a slim hardback collection and wisely advises readers to acquire a poet's original collected poems, not a weaker modern one that's poorly organized. James talks about poetry "as if it were the most exciting thing in the world, which indeed it is." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher