Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 [Hardcover]

Clive James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2008

Inspired, through his vast reading, by the poetic voices of the past, yet always speaking in a voice unmistakably his own, Clive James ineffably combines humor and great tragedy (but never solemnity) to create poems that are at once traditional yet engagingly fresh.

With this coruscating work, James, swimming through cultural debris both high and low, dispenses with his reputation as a perennial court jester, establishing himself as a poet of enduring power and resonance.

from "Angels Over Elsinore"

How many angels knew who Hamlet was

When they were summoned by Horatio?

They probably showed up only because

The roster said it was their turn to go.

Another day, another Dane. Too bad,

But while they sang their well-rehearsed lament

They noticed his good looks. Too soon, too sad,

This welcome home for what seemed heaven sent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Famous for decades in Britain and in his native Australia as an essayist, critic and television presenter, James has latterly gained attention in both those countries for his poems, long a sidelight, but now moving toward center stage. James's most memorable works include jokes (The book of my enemy has been remaindered/ And I am pleased), and he shows the ease and comic timing of a born performer in free verse and in easily rhymed stanzas. Yet he is not only a comedian: Philip Larkin, he says in an elegy for that poet, didn't sound like poetry one bit,/ Except for being absolutely it, and James sets himself a similar goal. James evokes long-ago student days in Sydney or 21st-century scenes in London, along with male lusts, both absurd (Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini) and touching (a May-December romance glimpsed in a train station). James's high profile may help win reviews, but his selection (not scanty or overlong) will win hearts and minds only if readers find in it what James finds in his favorite paintings: Proofs that the incandescent present tense/ Is made eternal by our transience. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

“In a culture growing weak from forgetfulness,” James says, “to be memorable should be the aim.” That’s a dangerous way to introduce a half-century’s work, rather daring us to find it forgettable. But there is much to remember in these poems (e.g., “I think her tongue was in her cheek, / but with that much plastic surgery it was hard to tell”) that themselves are acts of memorization. Unlike many other contemporary writers, James recalls not only personal memories, like the titular sunset (a phrase that, in an extravagantly clever poem, drifts down the stanzas like the poet moving towards home), but also cultural memories. In “Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley,” he dines with a woman who knew a man who . . . you get the drift. Personal experience is important in this poem because it connects James to a larger cultural history. “Fifty years on, the place still packs a thrill,” James says of Hemingway’s Africa. Fifty years on, his verse does, too. --Patricia Monaghan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393067076
• ISBN-13: 978-0393067071
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Clive James poetry just gets better, August 23, 2011

By 

John Woodrow - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 (Paperback)

With "Opal Sunset" we can see how Clive James's poetry has now reached a richer level of emotional revelation and has moved on from the clever wordplay he showed from his undergraduate days on.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Critical Enough, January 26, 2009

By 

Michael Salcman (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 (Hardcover)

Unless one is a masochist, which I am not, there is no reward in heaven for one poet reviewing the work of another, particularly when that other is one of our most important, lucid and exacting literary critics, Clive James. "Opal Sunset", his self-selected book, collects his own work from a career of fifty years. Although there are occasional poems in free-form, the great majority are strictly metered and cleverly rhymed. James has probably forgotten more about technical matters than most poets have ever managed to learn. The voice in his poems is a lot like that of Frederick Seidel, world-weary, all-too-knowing, cynical and satiric. As in his prose, James does not suffer fools gladly; the chief problem with the poems is that he rarely suffers at all. The fun is usually at the expense of someone else as in the famously brilliant poem that opens the collection, "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered." Even this jewel is perhaps one section too long. The great majority of the poems are in four and five line stanzas; the quatrains, especially, are so precise in their rhythm and rhyme that a certain weariness sets in, a sameness that confounds Emerson's and Frost's advice in regard to the meter-making argument; purposeful variation is all but not often enough found here.

The first half of the book contains work from the first 45 years of his career; the second half is devoted to the most recent five years of production! Fortunately, the poems in the new section, from "Status Quo Vadis" (p.122) through "As I See You" (p.204), actually his first published poem used as a bookend, improve the overall effect and mitigate the tedium of tone and structure. "Status Quo Vadis" concludes with a stunner of a stand-alone line: "the breath of life is what actually kills you." There are lovely poems about long-lived love, "Anniversary Serenade" and a double sonnet "Double or Quits", "Fires Burning, Fires Burning" about 9-11 and the death of his mother, poems about his native Australia and the war against the Japanese, and the death of his father in World War II. This attention to his basic humanity, to the tragic dimension of life as well as its humor, saves the collection. The marvelous "Portrait of Man Writing" is a self-conscious meditation on what he should say of the artist who is presently drawing his portrait; it ends with the couplet "Let's break for lunch. What progress have we made?/Ah yes. That's me exactly, I'm afraid."

This is a book well worth dipping into for such flashes of genuine emotion and humility, for the technical lessons to be learned, for the music lavished on ordinary subjects too often beaten by others into lineated prose. James shares both the significant gifts and musty limitations of a poet like Alexander Pope to such a degree that Chris Wiman's blurb, beginning with the observation that James's "poetry has been greatly overshadowed by his prose", may contain within it the ultimate estimate of posterity. A good poet but a profound critic.

3 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Was Impressed, October 17, 2008

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 (Hardcover)

I find reviewing poetry to be far more difficult than reviewing either prose or movies, because the medium, like music, translates so unwillingly into the craft of the reviewer. So let me simply leave it at this: I think Mr. James writes nice poems.