Our most valuable living English-language writer?
In our lead review this month, writer, blogger, poet, novelist and sometime musician Julian Gough pays tribute to the poetry and essays of Clive James—and talks to the man himself about the central role poetry has in his literary world.
Few authors can match the dazzling, and very public, complexity of James’s CV: TV critic and pundit, satirist, novelist, hyper-cultured man of letters. And yet, Gough argues, it’s the essays and poems that ultimately make sense of Clive James’s career—and that constitute his most substantial and lasting contribution to literature. Restrained, morally rigorous, self-critical, James’s is not a poetry of glib virtuosity. But it rewards reading, and re-reading, as the work of only a few other living authors (including certain Nobel-winning Irish poets) can.
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Can I be the first to say I thought Cultural Amnesia was the most pompous, bloated, sexist thing I’ve ever read? And this review tells me everything I need to know about Prospect.
The King is dead. Long live the King!
September 1956 – January 2009 Mick Imlah
http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/tribute/imlah/2995027
Time, Prospect, please, to remove the support stocking from your sleeping head, our love, and celebrate the life and incomparably fine work of this real poet and gentleman – instead of beating the Prospect pom pom for pushy, over-paid ‘celebrities’, such as Mr James, who will – if at all – be remembered only ( if not exactly celebrated ) for introducing the concept of gratuitous bug-eating to UK audiences via his cheap laugh sniggering at the merciless humiliation of contestants on Japanese game shows
For readers interested in knowing a little more about the gentle star that was Mick Imlah :
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5503818.ece