Book review: Sentenced to Life - Clive James poetry
Illness has changed James' thinking but has not extinguished his spark.
The punning title of Clive James' latest collection, published with an expectation that it will be his last, is characteristically robust. He is suffering from leukaemia but has been cracking staunch jokes recently about the embarrassment of his continuing survival in the wake of poems written at what he believed to be his last gasp.
Illness has changed his thinking but has not extinguished his spark. It has made him rueful, and grateful, too. Many of these poems are an appeal to the heart, and in particular to the heart of his wife. The collection's defining quality is gallantry and it is this that makes it so moving. There are also some infuriating and, perhaps inevitably, solipsistic poems here, but there is no fault you could highlight of which James himself is not aware and addressing in print.
Each poem is accessible and the secure rhymes have a chiming poignancy - as neat as beds tucked with hospital corners - a protest against formlessness and death. James does remorse almost as well as Thomas Hardy and Echo Point seems an echo of the poems Hardy wrote after the death of his wife.