by Clive James
If even a few people remember a line or two in a poem you wrote, you’re not just getting there, you’re there. That’s it: and all the greater glory is mere vanity. When Raleigh bade farewell to the world’s vanities – honoured rags, glorious bubbles – he put his best efforts into the poem with which he did it, and which no audience might ever read; a poem he crafted as if he were starting his life again, and had never fought the Spanish armada, or sailed to America, or dodged for his life when the Queen fell for him. Seamus Heaney faithfully tending his creative writing classes at Harvard, and Philip Larkin stacking shelves in his library at Hull, were both trying to tell you something: even if the blaze of poetic glory descends on you, somewhere in the middle of it you should maintain the realisation that your status as a poet is a side issue. Nothing matters except your new poem. Is the thing that demanded to be written demanding to be read aloud? Does it make your mouth move when you read? You might feel childish if it does, but try to remember that this whole misbegotten adventure began when you were very young and said something clever. It made you famous in your family, which should be fame enough while you get on with the business of saying something clever again.
It’s the task you were born to, or you think you were; and if it turns out that you were wrong, there are hundreds of other tasks that are poetic too, or can be made so if attended to with sufficient care and style. Your sense of dedication is one of the best things about you, so if you can’t use it doing this, use it doing something else – just as long as you get enough spare time to go on reading poetry, the second best thing after writing it, as I’m sure you agree.
Cambridge, 2017
‘A worthy successor to his 2015 collection, Sentenced to Life . . . Injury Time, on the whole, reminds us that James is, and has always been, a poet of clarity and control. His mastery of metre and rhyme is indisputable . . . Some of the more personal ones about his looming-but-deferred death have so much in common with the tone and diction of late poems by John Donne that it can seem as if the intervening four centuries had never happened . . . If Injury Time proves to be James’s last collection (as it well may not) it will be a more than memorable testament to have left behind’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘James has always been a fine poet with a considerable mastery of traditional forms as well as a marked capacity for the elegiac . . . Injury Time is a significant achievement and lasting testament to a man who is a marvel of a wordsmith and who in the face of a death sentence that has allowed him injury time has written some of his best poems . . . this is a book by a true artist. It will ring in the ears and tug at the heart of any reader’
Peter Craven, The Australian
‘Injury Time heads the latest/last collection of his poems, which are rightly heralded as “a major literary event”. Though the title’s sporting metaphor is characteristic, it has very little to do with “sport”. The poems are as widely ranging and inventive as ever, both in their form and their content. They range daringly from a splendidly substantial celebration of the deaf Beethoven to various self-revealing meditations on his own carcinoma. The latter can be admired at full strength in “Night-Walkers Song”, but his playful wit and imagination are as ever wonderfully varied’
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year 2017
Injury Time
CLIVE JAMES is the multi-million-copy bestselling author of more than forty books. His poetry collection Sentenced to Life and his translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy were both Sunday Times top ten bestsellers, and his collections of verse have been shortlisted for many prizes. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013 an Officer of the Order of Australia.
ALSO BY CLIVE JAMES
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Unreliable Memoirs Falling Towards England
May Week Was In June North Face of Soho
The Blaze of Obscurity
FICTION
Brilliant Creatures The Remake
Brrm! Brrm! The Silver Castle
VERSE
Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985
The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958–2008
Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003–2008
Nefertiti in the Flak Tower Sentenced to Life
Collected Poems 1958–2015 Gate of Lilacs The River in the Sky
TRANSLATION
The Divine Comedy
CRITICISM
The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)
Visions Before Midnight The Crystal Bucket
First Reactions (US) From the Land of Shadows
Glued to the Box Snakecharmers in Texas
The Dreaming Swimmer Fame in the 20th Century
On Television Even As We Speak Reliable Essays
As of This Writing (US) The Meaning of Recognition
Cultural Amnesia The Revolt of the Pendulum
A Point of View Poetry Notebook
Latest Readings Play All
TRAVEL
Flying Visits
First published 2017 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-5299-4
Copyright © Clive James 2017
Cover Design by Stuart Wilson, Picador Art Department
Cover images © Shutterstock, Hayden Verry @ Arcangel Images and Duncan Shaw @ Getty Images
The right of Clive James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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