The subtitle of Clive James’s Poetry Notebook, added for the American edition, is “Reflections on the Intensity of Language.” This is because it is the “intensity of language,” not formal unity, James writes in the volume’s introduction, that marks “the real difference between poetry and prose.”
This doesn’t mean that James is soft on form—or not entirely. Technique, he writes, “will always be part of the poet’s schooling,” and formal unity is a poem’s “binding energy,” even if it’s not “the most important of its energies.” What matters most is a phrase, a line, or a stanza that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before and will never forget. This is what James calls a poem’s “moment”—an incalculable, “unforgettable” spot of “concentrated meaning.”
The result is a book of “moments” and moment-makers, and, unsurprisingly, James is an entertaining and often convincing guide. “There was never a more burningly focused romance,” James writes, than Louis MacNeice’s “Meeting Point”—a poem that “tapped into the perennial British conviction . . . that heterosexual love between adults should reach its emotional apotheosis at a public meeting point where the most intense thoughts must stay unspoken.” Michael Donaghy’s “Machines” is “at least as well built as either the harpsichord or the bicycle celebrated in the narrative.” And a single passage from James Merrill’s “The Broken Home” was “enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived.”
Short discussions of many of the major poets of twentieth century are sprinkled
