His own worst critic? Clive James the poet

Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of those guys was a poet. Alongside the celebrated columns in the Observer, and Saturday Night Clive, and the Postcard From… documentaries, and Clive James on Television, and so on and so forth, there was a lifetime’s outpouring of verse. Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last is the first book-length study of James’s poetry. One sincerely hopes that it is not the last.

Shircore has written books about JFK, on conspiracy theories, and a book about The Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy. A friend and an admirer of James — he’s already published one book about James’s work as a songwriter with the musician Pete Atkin — he’s really an enthusiast rather than a critic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. We can’t all be William Empson. Though we might at least try.

Shircore several times criticises ‘the traditional academic analysis’ of poetry with its tendency towards ‘the plodding autopsy’, but there’s plenty of plodding here: the ‘enduring appeal’ of one poem, we are told, ‘stems partly from its subject matter, partly from its vibrant energy and gusto and partly from an attention to detail in its execution’; another poem is praised for containing ‘so many ideas, so many unexpected images, such potent, unflashy turns of phrase’.