Culture

Clive James: as good as Heaney

December 17, 2008
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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.