"...Eloquence Left Behind..."
I miss Clive James. His wit
and easy charm always made his writing bristle with that rarity in the world of
highbrow verbiage - truth without pretension.
First published in 2016 by
Picador at the cost of £25 in hardback, "Collected Poems" by CLIVE JAMES is a bit of
a beast frankly. You get 578 pages of work roughly covering four to five
volumes of poetry that also includes new stuff to the chronological front -
early works - itself tail-ended by his famous collaborative lyrics with Pete
Atkins on RCA Victor Records in the Seventies. There are also many personal comments by James on
varying pieces and their hidden meanings, historical references, geographical
placement and so on. The gold-lettering dust jacket also lends this (now posthumous in 2022) tome
a genuine feeling of event and class too.
I did struggle with some of
the earlier pieces where you can feel how hard he is trying to impress and I'm
not sure why he insisted all the time that every verse rhyme no matter what - I
often felt that took away from what he was actually trying to say. But every
night I kept on turning the pages, looking forward to the next clever use of
nouns and descriptive flights of wordy-fancy.
By the time you get to those
verses from "Sentenced To Life" - the volume that deals with his
illness and increasing physical and mental decline – the poems take an
altogether more melancholic and brutal approach. He has literally no time to
waste, so they are both beautiful and heart-breaking - the humanity shining
through as he lays out in harsh accurate detail just how sad and lonely old age
and reminiscing on mistakes and lost opportunities can be.
Not wanting to spoil it for
you, I'll go no further, except to say I picked up my nearly-new copy in 2022
even after his sad passing for under a fiver - and its been the best skydiver
I've forked out in a long while.
Good luck and happy trails Clive on your
journey to the next blotter and pencil mug and thanks for all the humanity and
laughs you left so eloquently behind...
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