CLIVE JAMES
Collected Poems
1958–2015
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
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To Prue
Or v’è sola una piuma, che all’invito
Del vento esita, palpita leggera:
Qual sogno antico in anima severa
Fuggente sempre e non ancor fuggito.
Pascoli
A single feather sought out by the wind
Hesitates and lightly trembles,
As an old desire remains in a strict soul:
Always about to fly but not yet flown.
Quod si inseris me lyricis vatibus,
feriam sidera sublimi vertici.
Horace
If you rank me with the lyric poets,
my exalted head shall strike the stars.
Each man starts with his very first breath
To devise shrewd means for outwitting death.
James Cagney
Contents
Introduction
Early Poems
from The Book of My Enemy
Poems
Parodies, Imitations and Lampoons
Selected Verse Letters
from Angels Over Elsinore
from Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
from Sentenced to Life
Selected Song Lyrics
Notes
Notes for the Song Lyrics
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Introduction
For this collection I have chosen, from a lifetime’s work in verse, only those poems and lyrics that I believe might stand alone. Previous selections – Other Passports, The Book of My Enemy and Opal Sunset – were already winnowings, and this volume makes even more of a point out of setting things aside that once cost many nights of labour. At the time, I thought that anything I wrote was indispensable, but eventually, sometimes after only a decade or so, a sense of proportion came to the rescue. With a few exceptions, my longer poems have been left out on the grounds that they were tied to their time; although one day Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage might return in a book of its own, because its picture of the London Literary World still strikes me as true even if most of its cast have by now been carried from the stage. The excitement of that clueless young man as he took his place among the poets and the critics was still with him as he met his doom.
Excitement and poetry ought never to be alien to one another, but there is always a tendency, in the homeland of poetry in English, to look on the fabulously rich literary heritage as an established church. The privilege of the American, Irish and Australian poets – not to mention poets from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, India and the Caribbean, and there might be one from Belize – is to provide fresh reminders that the tradition is not a litany, but a permanent upheaval, not to say a carnival. As an Australian in England for more than half a century, I have never felt cause to stop setting some of my poems in my homeland. The British readership likes hearing about it, and nowadays even the Americans can make a fair stab at guessing where Australia is. As for the critics, guardians of the ramparts, eventually they have to listen to the readers: and anyway the jokes about Australian culture being a contradiction in terms are by now so out of date that only a politician would use them, out of his head on Australian wine as he does so. There are quite a few poems about Australia here, even more of them near the end than near the beginning; but really they are all about the English language, which is the powerhouse at the heart of the subject. Even a poem about nothing would have to be about that.
Poems about nothing can be useful to anyone who wants to combine cult status with academic respectability, but that combination always struck me as something dependent on an abstract concept of literature, instead of arising from the sung lyricism of the English lyric before Shakespeare – the same sung lyricism that my daughters heard when they bopped around with Abba’s greatest hits blasting in their headphones, and that is heard today by my granddaughter, aged ten, as she contemplates on YouTube the enthralling intricacies of Taylor Swift singing ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. When the poem strays too far from the song it risks death by refinement. Luckily, from my Cambridge Footlights days onward, I was in a position to test this idea through my working partnership with Pete Atkin. Some of the lyrics I wrote for him are here. The music is on his albums, and shows what the form and its punctuation are meant to be like: but the lyric on the page still has the phrasing, which, for me, is the bedrock of the whole thing. If a poem or a lyric does not end up studded with turns of phrase that I had no idea were going to happen, I should not have begun it.
But it’s easy to lay down the law now, when the light is fading. The trick is to follow your creative principles in the long years before you even know how to define them. I hope that younger readers, especially, will find this book to be a progression from one clarity to the next, even when it seems like one mystery after another. That’s just how it was for me.
Cambridge 2016
Early Poems
As I See You
As I see you
Crystals grow
Leaves chime
Roses flow
As I touch you
Tables turn
Towers lean
Witches burn
As I leave you
Lenses shiver
Flags fall
Show’s over
The Deep Six
Because the leaves relaxing on the water
Arrange themselves in attitudes of death
Like mannequins who practise languor
I know it must be autumn in the sea.
When the time comes for me to take you there
Through hanging gardens, and all colour trails away
To leave your eyes entirely my secret
And your hair like smoke rising
You will never learn from me about the winter
That will keep us locked at wrist and lips for ever
Like a broken clockwork model of a kiss
When everything is over, where we came from.
Berowra Waters, New South Wales
The seas of the moon are white on white towards evening
Kingfisher strikes head out on the deck for the trees
Veils of tulle are drawn by the dragonflies
Fireships of cirrus assemble and ride in the west
Tracksuit trousers go on, and a second sweater
Baiting for low-level fish is like writing a letter
To someone whose last name you caught but whose first you missed.
The sun goes over the hill with a whole day’s flames
The bottles fluoresce going down, like silver spiders
The old astronomers’ animals graze the fields of stars
The guttering cirrus drops on the tide to the Sea of Dreams.
The Morning from Cremorne, Sydney Harbour
Someone sets it
Turning again,
Dumps of junk
Jewellery doing
Their slow burn:
Bonbons spill, and a
Rocket rips,
Pops, goes haywire
Inside the head
Of an emerald pit
Some con man sold
Who’s dead, perhaps.
With each night showing
Your share less
You weep for the careless
Day’s use:
A play of light
That folds each night
While the milkmen dress.
Con man, milkman,
Someone wires
The light traps,
Ice fires:
The hail-fall blazing
Trails to dawn
That will take the wraps
Of white glass wool
From the warships
Coming into their own
Cold steel.
The Lady in Mourning at Camelot
Before the tournament began
She walked abroad in sable sack:
Embattled knights rang hollow when
They tapped each other on the back
And pointed
(Get the one in black)
All plumage is but camouflage
To shapeliness, this lady knew,
And brilliants shame the lips and eyes:
Simplicity, not sadness, so
Became her
(Check. She stole the show)
Four Poems about Porpoises
I
Swallows in leotards
Burrowing holes
Submarine termites
Quicksilver moles
Dazzling galleries
Spiralling aisles
Daydreams in sunlight
Sinking for miles
Hurtling shuttles
Trip up and flee –
Porpoises, weaving
A shot-silk sea.
II
In Operation Silent Sails
For submarines at sea last night
The porpoises, on fire with fright
Blew every tube in Fylingdales.
III
I take one look and I know I’m dreaming –
Planing fins and the colour streaming
Boundary layers in the mind.
I take a breath and I’m sure I’m stalling –
Looping blades and the harvest falling:
Light brigades along the wind.
I take my ease and I’m scared I’m ageing –
Stunting jets and a war game raging;
Seas are riddled, undermined.
I take my leave and I know I’m crying
Tears I’ll be a lifetime drying,
The tree house down and the peach tree dying
Home behind.
IV
Porpoises move
Through tunnels of love.
The Banishment
Ma fu’ io solo, là dove sofferto
fu per ciascun di tòrre via Fiorenza,
colui che la difesi a viso aperto.
Blemishes age
The Arno tonight
The lamps on the bridges
Piledrive light
Kinky bright krisses
Bent new pin
Opal portcullises
Lychees in gin
Bean-rows of breakable
Stakes going in
Chinese brass burnishes.
Pearlshell caskets
Tumble plunder
Soft rose ledges
Give, go under
Bolts of lamé
Fray
Sunder.
If you open slowly
Eyes half crying
That whole flowing
Blurs like dying
Chi’en-Lung
Colours
Run.
Pinking scissors
Choke on velvet:
Cut-throat razors
Rust in claret.
The Crying Need for Snow
It’s cold without the softness of a fall
Of snow to give these scenes a common bond
And though, besotted on a viewless rime,
The ducks can do their standing-on-the-pond
Routine that leaves you howling, all in all
We need some snow to hush the whole thing up.
The ducks can do their flatfoot-waterfool
Mad act that leaves you helpless, but in fine
We need their footprints in a higher field
Made pure powder, need their wig-wag line
Of little kites pressed in around the pool:
An afternoon of snow should cover that.
Some crystalline precipitate should throw
Its multifarious weightlessness around
For half a day and paint the whole place out,
Bring back a soft regime to bitter ground:
An instant plebiscite would vote for snow
So overwhelmingly if we could call it now.
An afternoon of snow should cover that
Milk-bottle neck bolt upright in the slime
Fast frozen at the pond’s edge, brutal there:
We need to see junk muffled, whitewashed grime,
Lean brittle ice grown comfortably fat,
A world prepared to take our footprints in.
A world prepared to take our footprints in
Needs painting out, needs be a finer field:
So overwhelmingly, if we could call it now,
The fluffy stuff would prime it: it would yield
To lightest step, be webbed and toed and heeled,
Pushed flat, smoothed off, heaped high, pinched anyhow,
Yet be inviolable. Put like that,
Gently, the cold makes sense. Snow links things up.
The Glass Museum
In cabinets no longer clear, each master’s exhibit
Of Murano-manufactured glass has the random look,
Chipped and dusty with eclectic descriptive cards,
Of the chemistry set the twelve-year-old abandons,
The test tubes cracked, the pipette choked solid with dirt:
A work-with-your-hands vocation that never took
And was boxed away near the bottom of the cupboard
Between the clockwork Hornby and the Coldstream Guards.
The supreme exemplars, Ferro, Bigaglia, Radi;
Their prize examples, goblet, bottle and dish;
These classical clearings overgrown in a lifetime
By a jungle of tabular triumphs and tendrilled fish,
Dummy ceramics tricked out with a hand-faked Guardi,
Tubular chandeliers like a mine of serpents:
Age in, age out, the demand was supplied for wonders,
And talent discovered bravura could pay like crime –
To the death of taste and the ruin of common sense.
So the few good things shine on in the junk museum –
A dish with a milk-white helix imprisoned inside,
Miniature polychrome craters and pocket amphoras
Flambeau-skinned like an oil slick slimmed by the tide –
While more global-minded than ever the buyers come
By the jet-load lot into Marco Polo to order
Solid glass sharks complete with sucking remoras
Or thigh-high vases certain to sell like a bomb
Whether north of Bering Strait or south of the Border,
As throughout the island the furnaces roar all day
And they crate the stuff in wood wool to barge it across
To Venice which flogs it direct or else ships it away
And must know by now these gains add up to a loss
But goes on steadily selling itself down the river.
In Sydney years ago when my eyes were wider
I would shuffle the midway sawdust at the Easter Show
As the wonder-boy from Murano rolled pipes of glass
In the furnace-glow underneath a sailcloth roof
And expelled his marvellous breath into gleaming spheres
Which abruptly assumed the shape of performing seals,
Silvered inside and no heavier than a moth –
Between the Hall of Mirrors and the Pygmy Princess
Across from the Ferris wheel and the Wall of Death.
The Young Australian Rider, P. G. Burman
P
hilip Burman bought an old five hundred
Side-valve BSA for twenty quid.
Unlicensed as they were, both it and him,
He poker-faced ecstatically rode home
In second gear, one of the two that worked,
And everything that subsequently could be done
To make ‘her’ powerful and bright, he did:
Inside a year she fled beneath the sun
Symphonically enamelled black and plated chrome.
At eighteen years of age he gave up food,
Beer and all but the casual cigarette
To lay his slim apprentice money out
On extra bits like a special needle jet
For a carb the makers never knew about.
Gradually the exhaust note waxed more lewd,
Compression soared, he fitted stiffer springs
To keep the valves from lagging at their duties.
The decibels edged up, the neighbours nearly sued,
Hand over fist that breathed-on bike grew wings
Until her peak lay in the naughty nineties.
Evenings after school I’d bolt my meal
And dive around to his place. In the back
Veranda where he slept and dressed he’d have
Her roaring with her back wheel off the floor
Apocalyptically – the noise killed flies –
Her uncased primary chain a singing blur.
His pet Alsatian hid behind a stack
Of extra wheels, and on the mantelpiece
A balsa Heinkel jiggled through imagined skies.
There was a weekend that we took her out
To Sutherland to sprint the flying mile
Against a mob of Tiger Hundreds. I
Sat wild-eyed and saw his style tell,
Streaming the corners like remembered trails.