Clive James is one of our finest critics and best-loved cultural voices. He is also a prize-winning poet. Since he was first enthralled by the mysterious power of poetry, he has been a dedicated student. In fact, for him, poetry has been nothing less than the occupation of a lifetime, and in this book he presents a distillation of all he's learned about the art form that matters to him most.
With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, James explains the difference between the innocuous stuff that often passes for poetry today and a real poem: the latter being a work of unity that insists on being heard entire and threatens never to leave the memory. A committed formalist and an astute commentator, he offers close and careful readings of individual poems and poets (from Shakespeare to Larkin, Keats to Pound), and in some case second readings or re-readings late in life - just to be sure he wasn't wrong the first time!
Whether discussing technical details of metaphorical creativity or simply praising his five favourite collections of all time, he is never less than captivating.
About the Author
Clive James is the author of more than thirty books. As well as verse and novels, he has published collections of essays, literary criticism, television criticism and travel writing, plus four volumes of autobiography. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.
Industry Reviews
The material was well worth collecting ... entertaining ... His hand has not lost its cunning Financial Times He is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time -- Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times
Culture The James voice is immediately recognisable. To describe it as comic does not do it justice: it might be fairer to say that the world it inhabits is prone, at most times, to a comedy of desperate sorts ... James's best comedy is in the phrase-making, a craft at which he excels ... James was - and remains - far more than a clever boy laughing at muddied oafs. He is a scholar who has preferred wearing his scholarship lightly ... Full of an energy that is partly Augustan but racier, as if Dr Johnson had sealed a pact with the 19th-century poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed ... Witty but fully sounded through, grave but not solemn -- George Szirtes New Statesman
As a critic, James is formidable, blending vast reading with the knowledge of practice. He demurs from having an "aesthetic system", but this is too modest. There are some clear positions in Poetry Notebook, and they are erudite, strident, but balanced ... Poetry Notebook is a stellar collection by a great Australian writer, a man who, "[l]ooking back ... with tired eyes", retains the poetic enthusiasm of his teenage self -- James McNamara The Australian
We should be grateful still to benefit from [Clive James'] encyclopaedic knowledge of and love for poetry and his almost faultless ability to, as he so suggestively puts it, 'listen to the flavour' of verse -- James Marriott Literateur
Clive James's Poetry Notebook reintroduced me to the intense pleasures of close reading. Although he has some hard - and funny - things to say about Ezra Pound, James is firmly committed to celebration. He reminds us that poetry is, or can be, "the most exciting thing in the world". And this is what literary criticism, and literary pedagogy, should aim for: not to add a further encrustation of complexity, but simply to instil the readerly habits of gratitude and awe -- Martin Amis, Books of the Year 2014 Financial Times
