Injury Time
Published on 4. May 2017
80 pages
978-1-5098-5299-4 (ISBN)
Description
The publication of Clive James's Sentenced to Life was a major literary event. Facing the end, James looked back over his life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty to produce his finest work: poems of extraordinary power that spoke to our most elemental emotions. Injury Time is its outstanding successor.
'James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational' - Joan Bakewell, Independent
With more time on the clock than he had anticipated, Clive James was all the more determined to use it wisely - to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days - while the sense of his own impending absence grew all the more powerfully acute.
In a series of intimate poems - from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight - James declares 'family' to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to 'reach the end'.
Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years.
Moving, inspirational and unsentimental, Injury Time is as accomplished as any of his works; even at the end, he was in the form of his life.
Clive James (1939-2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collection Sentenced to Life and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, both Sunday Times bestsellers. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook, and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy.
Praise for Clive James:
'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
'Wise, witty, terrifying, unflinching and extraordinarily alive' - A.S. Byatt, critic and author of Possession: A Romance
'Clive James is a true poet' - Peter Porter, London Review of Books
'James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational' - Joan Bakewell, Independent
With more time on the clock than he had anticipated, Clive James was all the more determined to use it wisely - to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days - while the sense of his own impending absence grew all the more powerfully acute.
In a series of intimate poems - from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight - James declares 'family' to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to 'reach the end'.
Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years.
Moving, inspirational and unsentimental, Injury Time is as accomplished as any of his works; even at the end, he was in the form of his life.
Clive James (1939-2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collection Sentenced to Life and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, both Sunday Times bestsellers. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook, and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy.
Praise for Clive James:
'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
'Wise, witty, terrifying, unflinching and extraordinarily alive' - A.S. Byatt, critic and author of Possession: A Romance
'Clive James is a true poet' - Peter Porter, London Review of Books
Reviews / Votes
James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational -- Joan Bakewell * Independent * Injury Time heads the latest/last collection of his poems, which are rightly heralded as 'a major literary event'. Though the title's sporting metaphor is characteristic, it has very little to do with 'sport'. The poems are as widely ranging and inventive as ever, both in their form and their content. They range daringly from a splendidly substantial celebration of the deaf Beethoven to various self-revealing meditations on his own carcinoma. The latter can be admired at full strength in 'Night-Walkers Song', but his playful wit and imagination are as ever wonderfully varied -- Katherine Duncan-Jones * Times Literary Supplement * A fresh volume of poetry describing the joys of the bonus years the great polymath has been given by medicine, determination and love * Evening Standard * James has approached the time of his vanishing with grace and good humour, not sentimentality or anger. These poems are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive * Financial Times * Here are these amazing works, highly praised, technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems reflecting gratefully on a life . . . James's famous voice twinkles even in his weakened state -- Douglas Murray * Spectator * James's recent poems . . . represent the very best work James has ever done in verse -- Jason Guriel * New Republic * James as always been a fine poet with a considerable mastery of traditional forms as well as a marked capacity for the elegiac . . . Injury Time is a significant achievement and lasting testament to a man who is a marvel of a wordsmith and who in the face of a death sentence that has allowed him injury time has written some of his best poems . . . this is a book by a true artist. It will ring in the ears and tug at the heart of any reader -- Peter Craven * The Australian * A worthy successor to his 2015 collection, Sentenced to Life . . . Injury Time, on the whole, reminds us that James is, and has always been, a poet of clarity and control. His mastery of metre and rhyme is indisputable . . . Some of the more personal ones about his looming-but-deferred death have so much in common with the tone and diction of late poems by John Donne that it can seem as if the intervening four centuries had never happened . . . If Injury Time proves to be James' last collection (as it well may not) it will be a more than memorable testament to have left behind * Sydney Morning Herald *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pan Macmillan
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
File size
3,35 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-5098-5299-4 (9781509852994)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Clive James was the author of more than forty books. As well as essays, he published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus five volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was In June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. As a television performer he appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the Postcard series of travel documentaries. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller. 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. He held honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013, an Officer of the Order of Australia. He died in 2019.
