Collected Poems: 1958 – 2015

The “”technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems”” ( Spectator ) of Clive James are collected in this decades-spanning volume. Clive James’s reputation as a poet has become impossible to ignore. His recent poems looking back over his extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty, such as ‘Japanese Maple’ (first published in the New Yorker in 2014), became global news events upon their publication. His most recent collection, Sentenced to Life , was a phenomenal bestseller in the UK and in Australia, and his translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller in 2013. In this book, James makes his own rich selection from over fifty years’ work in verse: from his early satires to these heart-stopping valedictory poems, he proves himself to be as well suited to the intense demands of the tight lyric as he is to the longer mock-epic. Collected Poems displays James’s fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope, his lightly worn erudition and his emotional power; it will undoubtedly cement his reputation as one of the most versatile and accomplished of contemporary writers. MORE PRAISE FOR CLIVE JAMES “”James writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force”” The Times “”After writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured”” Independent on Saturday “”A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone”” Observer —- ISBN: 9781509812400