Born in Australia, Clive James lived in Cambridge, England. He was the author of Unreliable Memoirs; a volume of selected poems, Opal Sunset; the best-selling Cultural Amnesia; and the translator of The Divine Comedy by Dante. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He was an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Clive James was the author of more than forty books. As well as essays, he published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus five volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was In June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. As a television performer he appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the Postcard series of travel documentaries. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller. He died in 2019.
Sentenced to Life: Poems
Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which—for all their grappling with death and illness—are primarily a celebration of what is treasurable and memorable in our time here. Again and again, James reminds us that he is not only a poet of effortless wit and lyric accomplishment but also an immensely wise one, who delights in using poetic form to bring a razor-sharp focus to his thought.
Throughout the collection, James points to the stark fact of human life’s presence and all our experiences, here, transiently, on this earth.
Sentenced to life, I sleep face-up as though
Ice-bound, lest I should cough the night away,
And when I walk the mile to town, I show
The right technique for wading through deep clay.
A sad man, sorrier than he can say.
And all the poems feel like they follow from this assertion, worrying away at the question of what we then do with our lives, how best to live, questions of meaning. For Clive James, so much meaning clearly gathers in the very fact of the world’s beauty as refracted within the human gaze. In Too Much Light, his cataracts ‘invest the bright spring day/ With extra glory, with a glow that stings.’ In the title poem, he looks with astonishment at goldfish swimming in a garden pool: ‘never touching, never going wrong:/ Trajectories as perfect as plain song.’ Both poems sing of the imperfections of human agency, our messy trajectories and sight, as being both a source of pain and of wonder. But the fact of dying, of breathing the air ‘as if there were not much more of it there’, heightens for him a sense of sustained astonishment in the brevity and glory of every conscious moment, and its released multitude of revelations.
He goes on, in Sentenced to Life, to reflect:
Once I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.
This view of life’s preciousness echoes Dennis Potter who, in the last months of his life, spoke of seeing the beauty of the blossom outside his window in Ross: ‘it is the whitest, frothiest, blossoms blossom that ever could be, and I can see it…The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.’ Within these poems though, the revelation of our earth- and time-bound lives and of these brightly lit moments, carry further still. They bring us to what T. S. Eliot described it as: ‘the only wisdom we can hope to acquire…/ the wisdom of humility.’
This is most manifest in his acknowledgement of the inevitability of death.
In Driftwood Houses he shares without fear or overly attachment to life -
To hear me talk
You’d think I found my fate sad.Hardly that:
All that has happened is that I’ve hit the wall.
Disintegration is appropriate’
In Plot Points, further to the expressed awe in Event Horizon, James parallels the universe’s diminishing with our own, and notices how capable we are of choosing to forget both:
While you were reading this
Millions of stars moved closer
Towards their own extinction
So many years ago –
But let’s believe our eyes:
They say it’s all here now.
James suggests that the truth clears away ‘so many souvenirs’. And in a life such as his, there are many such souvenirs. If there is regret in these poems, and there’s much of it, it isn’t around the fact that he is dying, but rather around how he has lived, how he might have lived otherwise: ‘If I seem close to tears/ It’s for my sins, not sickness.’ And from this regret he comes away with the remarkable conclusion that his current state is in fact more authentic than the illusory existence that preceded it.
In the brilliant poem, Landfall he asks – ‘those years in the clear, how real were they’, and goes on:
I called it health but never stopped to think
It might have been a kind of weightlessness,
That footloose feeling always on the brink
Of breakdown: the false freedom of excess.
So now, rather than a life of ‘sirens’ and adoration, he asks for, and is gratified by, the present and the real: ‘Remember when I asked for a thousand kisses?/ Let’s make it ten. Why not kiss me just once?’ And he arrives at, and brings us to, a place of ‘Thanks for the heartbeat which still lets me live:/ A consolation even now, so late’. Thanks for our life-giving pulse is a different position altogether to one of reductive expectation and rights. Faced with our finitude we might readily arrive at either: at thanks or at greed. However, it is a position of gratitude that opens us to what we owe, over and above what it is we are entitled to.
Adapted from Blogs bmj
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