Opal Sunset marks the exuberant introduction of Clive James's
poetry to an American audience. Praised after the publication of
Cultural Amnesia as one of the finest prose stylists of his
generation, Clive James is now, with the publication of this
collection, being granted recognition as the poet he has always
been. For much of his long career it was hard to realize that
James's gift for poetry underlay his achievements in other fields.
First as a television critic on Fleet Street, and later as a
television personality in his own right, he achieved such fame for
writing the way he spoke that his poetry was regarded as an
idiosyncratic sideline, as if no celebrity could write worthy
verse. A conundrum presented itself: how could a serious poet also
be a television star? But for James, a duty to the discipline of
verse was always fundamental, and his accumulated poetic output
became impossible to ignore. As early as the 1970s, James's long,
mock epic "Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage through the London
Literary World" received almost unprecedented attention in his
adopted England, while later, his satirical short poem "The Book of
My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" became not only a standard verse
quoted at fancy dinner parties but entered the culture as lines to
be memorized by unpublished writers everywhere. James was suddenly
in the odd position of having written famous poems well before he
became a famous poet. Finally, the publication of a volume of his
collected verse, The Book of My Enemy, earned him in 2003 the
reputation as a serious poet that he has long deserved. Less
inhibited by fixed categories, a new generation of critics has
confirmed what James's public has instinctively known, that he
brings his poems to life with all the resources to be found in his
prose: wit, imagination, social observation, and a dazzling play of
language. In addition, his poems have an unmistakably
characteristic rhythm that makes it compulsory to read them aloud.
Switching between strict stanzas and free forms as the occasion
suits, James brings a compulsively readable coherence to either
mode; and always, over and above the binding force of his metrical
assurance, there is a lyricism that brings even the plainest
statement to extra life, and which often enters deeply into realms
of human emotion. His later poems about the tragedy that struck his
mother and father, for example, show an intensity of regret that
mark his maturity as a poet and bring out his unashamed nostalgia
for his homeland, Australia. Opal Sunset is a treasure chamber of
epigrammatic jewels to which the reader will return again and
again.
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