POETRY NOTEBOOK 2006-2014 - Clive James - a little treasure of a book

POETRY NOTEBOOK 2006-2014  by Clive James 

Macmillan - $37.99 Hardback

Reviewed on Radio New Zealand National with Kathryn Ryan – 4 December 2014

Although Australian, Clive James went to the UK in 1962 when he was 23 years of age and has lived there ever since so I guess he is as much a Brit as he is an Aussie.

He is a greatly loved critic and an essayist, poet and lyricist, novelist & memoirist, he has been a radio commentator and a playwright, he has more than 30 books published including his four volumes of autobiography. And of course he is very well known internationally for his work on television in the mid 1980’s to the mid-1990’s with his Clive James Postcard series and other series too. He is my favourite literary figure, a formidable critic who blends his lifetime of vast and broad reading with the encylopaedic  literary knowledge for which he is renowned.

Now terminally ill with leukaemia and emphysema he has put together over the past two or three years or so a glimpse into his life through poetry via a collection of essays, I love the one in which he describes EE Cummings as a “phonetic force” that “drove whole poems into my head like golden nails”.

 It is clear reading this book, which is expected  be his last, that poetry has been a major preoccupation throughout his life.

With his customary wit, along with his wide-ranging knowledge, and his hugely appealing lucid prose the book is quite captivating even to one like me who is not especially a reader of poetry. His instinctive love of poetry is the great delight of the book in which he presents a distillation of all he's learned about the art form that clearly matters to him most.

Filled with insight and written with an honest, infectious enthusiasm, Poetry Notebook is the product of over fifty years of writing, reading, translating and thinking about poetry. It is probably a little academic in places for me but for Clive James fans out there and especially those really keen on poetry, and /or studying it in tertiary institutions, this is a must read.
  
I should mention too that the last poem excerpted in the book is Hone Tuwhare’s  wonderful  poem, “To a Maori Figure Cast in Bronze Outside the Chief Post Office in Auckland”.

The bronze figure speaks thus:
I hate being stuck up here , glaciated, hard all over
And with my guts removed: my old lady is not going to like it……

James says  quote– “After twenty-five lines of brilliantly articulated bitching, the statue signs off – “Somebody give me a drink; I can’t stand it”.

James goes on to say, and remember this is the final page in the book- “Finally it is the vitality of language that decides everything, and this hard fact becomes adamantine as one’s own vitality ebbs. Nevertheless, I still plan to live forever: there are too many critical questions still to be raised”.
And the very last sentence – “Better to think back on all the poems you have ever loved, and to realise what they have in common: the life you must soon lose”.

The British awarded James a CBE in 2012 while the Australians made him an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2013, the equivalent of a knighthood.  He richly deserves these accolades and this book in its own special way is another one, it is no less than a little treasure.