As I write I have before me Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy, just out from Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton, where James and I both have the superb Robert Weil as an editor. It marks a new challenge—and represents years of hard work: first in mastering Italian, then in composing in modified quatrains with masculine rhymes. Now his readers will have even more to enjoy.

James is perhaps better known in Britain than in America—having made his name there first as a leading television celebrity, as well as a journalist, essayist, cultural critic, and poet. His latest book of verse, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, follows earlier collections—most notably The Book of My Enemy, Opal Sunset, and Angels over Elsinore—and reminds us of all for which we are grateful to him.1 His daring and accomplished poetic persona has ranged so widely—from lyric to satiric, from sentimental to phallic—and taken on so many challenges, that in him we find what amounts to a personal dialect, within which various modes flourish.

I am a generation older than Clive—many of whose friends are children of my lot—and came to know him in the early 1970s. I have long admired his work (and should disclose here that he gave my most recent “serious” book of verse, Penultimata, a splendid blurb). As Norman Moonbase I figure, along with Kingsley Amis (Kingsley Kong) and—from the North—Philip Larkin (Philip Lawks), in his 1976 mock epic Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World. Another of his early works was Unreliable Memoirs, the brilliant tale of his leaving Australia and coming to England—one of the only books I remember actually buying in a street shop to read awaiting lunch at a Soho restaurant. Over the years that followed, he published a variety of poems of differing length, structure, and intention, but almost all with formal metrical structure and rhyme schemes.

For James, Australia is “the land that continues to inspire it all, even when I have been long away.”

For James, Australia is “the land that continues to inspire it all, even when I have been long away.” In earlier collections he recalls his youthful experiences in Sydney with nostalgia, in poems such as “When We Were Kids” (“Now we are old and the memories returning/ Are like the last stars that fade before the morning”). Here, in “Fashion Statement,” we find him as a student at Sydney University—“The perfect atmosphere for epigrams/ To flaunt their filigree like toast-rack trams”—where he and his rackety high-brain booze-happy pals spend their time “Searching for words, and we who wrote them down/ Might not have looked it, but we owned the town.”

James is anti-Eliot and anti-Pound (“One had the gab, the other had the gift/ And each looked to the other for a lift”), but among poets of previous generations he admires W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden (with some reservations), and Philip Larkin (“Not exactly a torrent of creativity: just the best”). In “A Valediction for Philip Larkin,” from The Book of My Enemy, James’s thirty-three stanzas move from the vividly presented zoological wilds of Kenya—where he first learns of Larkin’s death—through various air connections back to England, as he muses, half-dreaming, on Larkin’s “technique which makes majestic the morose”:

Even in prose, as the novelist Anthony Burgess has written, “Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.” So it is a rare pleasure to read James, who has mastered not just the art, but the craft of poetry as well, becoming in the process one of the best poets writing in English. His poetry has never become any of the fashionable forms of word disarrangement that have claimed the title on the sole and insufficient ground that at least they are not prose. In “A Perfect Market,” James gives us a short and memorable guide on how to make a poem. He is clear not only on how to be a poet (“making the thing musical is part/ Of pinning down what you are on about”), but also on how to fail to understand the problem. Rejecting the modern argument that the “flight from rhyme/ And reason is a technically precise/ Response to the confusion of a time/ When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice,” James instead argues

Without this, “those who cannot write increase the store/ Of verses fit for those who cannot read.” James repeats Ronsard’s advice—ou plutost les chanter (“Recite your lines aloud. . . . Or even better, sing them”)—saying we are drawn to the sound of good poetry:

One of James’s characteristics is that his pieces are more often than not written round a context with a visual mental imagery quite different in tone or thought from the text that precedes it. Here it will help us to look at his often personal, unequivocal way of handling the varying and often astonishingly highly novel methods of vividly transforming his subjects into vintage verse. He keeps the balance just right in “Signing Ceremony,” set in the Hotel Timeo, Taormina, with sweeping views of the bay “stretching east/?Almost to Italy” and Mt. Etna, “Visibly seething in the politest way.”

Here he begins with “shallow vodka cocktails . . . spreading numb delight as they go down/ Their syrup mirrors the way lava flows.” James’s phrasing is individual and unmistakable—to the point sometimes of caricature, though never of contrivance. When he continues “Tonight might be our last, but this, at least,/ Is one romantic setting, am I right?,” he is writing lines that could never be taken for anything but Jamesian. Yet in a swift change of tone, he sees in the continuing cycle of Etna’s eruptions a various unity forming one long human drama. He has what is commonly lacking in modern poets, a properly rooted tragic sense, and moves swiftly to higher grade reflection on the transitory nature of life and the role love plays:

James’s writing on women and men’s love has both charm and amiability, praise and surprise. And all the senses, from taste to touch, all the feelings from the heart and tongue and eye and throat. Women in earlier poems are seen over a range of examples from Don Juan in “Sack Artist” (“Reeling between the redhead and the blonde/ Don Juan caught the eye of the brunette./ He had no special mission like James Bond”) to Ulysses in “The Nymph Calypso” (“. . . just this once he almost hadn’t lied”). In this volume, James returns to that theme in “And Then They Dream of Love”:

But follows with reflections on passion in “The Buzz”:

The old comfort themselves by calling young love blind,

More compelling is “Monja Blanca,” seven eight-line rhymes on the beautiful White Nun flower, “rarest and loveliest/ Of all her kind,” in which the poet sees the desire to possess as futile:

The best of these pages are long and in depth, as in “The Later Yeats”:

Yeats’s early poems are “wind-driven boats”—coracles, dhows—“A little navy floats / In his early pages.” Then, “when more substantial things asked to be said,” they become sloops, schooners (“These would have been enough to make him great”), until “at the heart/ Of this flotilla” the later work appears as “A huge three-decker fighting ship of state.” James remarks on the musicality of Yeats’s verse: “We’re held in thrall/ By music. Music lush, music austere,/ All music ever heart-felt, holds the flow/ Of splendour in one place.” He deftly weaves echoes of Yeats’s poems throughout, and in the final stanzas, sees the ship as “just a metaphor”

James’s themes, particularly in his own later poems, are from the whole human sphere: aging, sex, dying, pity, nostalgia, melancholy: the lacrimae rerum, and some of the cachinnationes rerum too, played out on a grand stage—as in “Vertical Envelopment,” written in free verse—a form perfectly suited to the poet’s drug-fuelled delusions:

The sinisterness, very faintly comic, is exactly suited to the theme. For even here, there is no feeling that any of the words have been selected for their novelty, or chicness, or violence, or egotism. There is an uncertain calm:

Among visions of “the young/ Soldiers of long ago, in the first years/ Of my full span, who went down through the dark/ With no lives to look back on,” figures of friends who’ve died make an appearance “My outfit one by one in the green light,/ Out of the door and down into the dark”:

Recognition of the delusion does not imply tidying up the terrors of it, and when he catalogues the frontal properties of the Jamesian daytime, these too are personal and sinister:

No book by even the best of English poets is faultless, but James’s flaws are meager and peripheral. Occasional mannerisms annoy—throw-away lines justified only by rhyme. In general his verse has a naturalness and rightness of tone, happily comprehending (as no unity prescribed by critical preconception can) lyric and rhetoric, statement and metaphor, concretion and abstraction. Talk about “great” and “major” poets is a vulgar distraction. These are perhaps suitable words of half a dozen poets, or fewer. None are alive today, and nothing could be more footling (as Byron pointed out in his own time) than the cries of some weekly critics, like teenagers mobbing a pop singer, “He’s the greatest!” But James would certainly be well up among the front-runners if poetry was, as some base fellows seem to think, a sort of competition. Even for those of us who have for years felt his work to be very fine and moving, this latest volume adds further to his stature. One’s advice is to read these poems first—the serpent beguiled me—then up into the whole oeuvre.