Clive James - restless but blessed

Clive James

Niall MacMonagle

May 22 2015 08:23 PM

Though growing old and dying are as natural as evening fading into night, Dylan Thomas urges us to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light". But for Clive James, pictured, now 75 and terminally ill with leukaemia, there is no rage. Raconteur, critic, polyglot, novelist, man of letters, man of the world, James, author of over thirty books, has lived the life and now at journey's end he sees himself as restless but blessed.

The poems in his new collection, Sentenced to Life Poems 2011-2014, written in extra time, tell of how he can still "talk the talk but cannot walk the walk". Once "I packed a hold-all and went anywhere" now he sees "the shell/ Of what I was" and, confined to home, he cherishes the Japanese anemones, the fish pond, the maple tree outside his window. "I see things with a whole new emphasis"; he not only remembers his Australian boyhood, movies, books, figures from history but he "enumerates my wrongs", tells of "my sin was to be faithless", the lies he told, his absence from home with regretful honesty. Now the predominant mood is gratitude.