James - Nefertiti in the flak tower: collected verse 2008-2011

ALSO BY CLIVE JAMES autobiography Unreliable Memoirs Falling Towards England May Week Was In June Always Unreliable North Face of Soho The Blaze of Obscurity fiction Brilliant Creatures The Remake Brrm! Brrm! The Silver Castle verse Other Passports: Poems 19581985 The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 19582003 Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 19582008 Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 20032008 criticism The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994) Visions Before Midnight The Crystal Bucket First Reactions (US) From the Land of Shadows Glued to the Box Snakecharmers in Texas The Dreaming Swimmer Fame in the Twentieth Century On Television Even As We Speak Reliable Essays As of This Writing (US) The Meaning of Recognition Cultural Amnesia The Revolt of the Pendulum A Point of View travel Flying Visits CLIVE JAMES Nefertiti in the Flak Tower COLLECTED VERSE 20082011 Copyright 2013, 2012 by Clive James All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Production manager: Louise Mattarelliano Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James, Clive, 1939 [Poems Selections] Nefertiti in the flak tower : collected verse 20082011 / Clive James. pages cm ISBN 978-0-87140-711-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-87140-729-0 (e-book) I. Title. Title.

PR9619.3.J27A6 2013b 821.914dc23 2013011170 Liveright Publishing Corporation 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT To Christian Wiman Acknowledgements My thanks to the editors of The New Yorker , Poetry (Chicago) , the TLS , the Spectator , the New Statesman , Poetry Review , Standpoint , the Australian Literary Review , the Australian Book Review and Quadrant . Owing to an oversight on my part, Dreams Before Sleeping was printed in Angels Over Elsinore with one crucial line missing, so I have given the poem another run.

Special Needs is in my volume of selected poems Opal Sunset but since I neglected to include it in Angels Over Elsinore it lacked a volume to be selected from, so to speak: hence its inclusion here. Otherwise all these poems are making their first appearance in volume form. Once again I am grateful to Don Paterson for his detailed comments and for choosing the order. Earlier this year my translation of The Divine Comedy was published in both the United States and the UK and may have given the impression that it was my chief poetic task in recent years. So it was, but even while I worked on the translation I never ceased to write short poemsbecause for me the short poem is the form that lies at the heart of everything. I continued to write short poems even after I fell ill, early in 2010.

Half the poems in this book were composed before that illness arrived, and the other half have been composed since, in the period when my doctors have many times told me that my life can never be the same as it was. Rather pleased to have been handed a whole new subject, I went on writing poems even when I was in hospital. As a guest of Addenbrookes, the great hospital in Cambridge, I wrote Vertical Envelopment, which American readers, especially if they are of an older generation, will notice is full of imagery from the time of D-Day. Another poem, Whitman and the Moth, was written in New Yorks Mount Sinai Hospital, where I was stretched out for ten nights recovering from a blood clot. While I lay there cursing, Adam Gopnik, correctly guessing what I needed most, brought me a stack of books. One of them was the Van Wyck Brooks study of Melville and Whitman, and from it I got some of the imagery for the poem that perhaps most typifies a lifetime of work in the form of the short poem.

Saluting Whitmans final moments, I combined American cultural information with a British range of tones. The combination might sound like an identity crisis in verbal form, but I prefer to think of it as an example of what Australian poetry might aim for if given the chance: an audience anywhere in the English-speaking world. For helping me believe I might be right, once again I thank my American editor, Robert Weil. Clive James, Cambridge, 2013 Hotel Timeo, Taormina The lilac peak of Etna dribbles pink, Visibly seething in the politest way. The shallow vodka cocktails that we sink Here on the terrace at the close of day Are spreading numb delight as they go down. Their syrup mirrors the way lava flows: Its just a show, it might take over town, Sometimes the Cyclops, from his foxhole, throws Rocks at Ulysses.

But regard the lake Of moonlight on the water, stretching east Almost to Italy. The love we make Tonight might be our last, but this, at least, Is one romantic setting, am I right? Cypresses draped in bougainvillea, The massed petunias, the soft, warm night, That streak of candy floss. And you, my star, Still walking the stone alleys with the grace Of forty years ago. Dont laugh at me For saying dumb things. Just look at this place. Time was more friend to us than enemy, And soon enough this backdrop will go dark Again.

The spill of neon cream will cool, The crater waiting years for the next spark Of inspiration, since the only rule Governing history is that it goes on: There is no rhythm of events, they just Succeed each other. Soon, we will be gone, And that volcano, if and when it must, Will flood the slope with lip-gloss brought to boil For other lovers who come here to spend One last, late, slap-up week in sun-tan oil, Their years together winding to an end. With any luck, theyll see what we have seen: Not just the picture postcard, but the splash Of fire, and know this flowering soil has been Made rich by an inheritance of ash. Only because its violent to the core The world grows gardens. Out of earth we came, To earth we shall return. But first, one more Of these, delicious echoes of the flame That drives the long life all should have, yet few Are granted as we were.

It wasnt fair? Of course it wasnt. But which of us knew, To start with, that the other would be there, One step away, for all the time it took To come this far and see a mountain cry Hot tears, as if our names, signed in the book Of marriage, were still burning in the sky? The wild White Nun, rarest and loveliest Of all her kind, takes form in the green shade Deep in the forest. Streams of filtered light Are tapped, distilled, and lavishly expressed As petals. Her sweet hunger is displayed By the labellum, set for bees in flight To land on. In her well, the viscin gleams: Mesmeric nectar, sticky stuff of dreams. This orchids sexual commerce is confined To flowers of her own class, and nothing less.

And yet for humans she sends so sublime A sensual signal that it melts the mind. The hunters brave a poisoned wilderness To capture just a few blooms at a time, And even they, least sensitive of men, Will stand to look, and sigh, and look again, Dying of love for what does not love them. Transported to the world, her wiles inspire The same frustration in rich connoisseurs Who pay the price for nourishing the stem To keep the bloom fresh, as if their desire To live forever lived again through hers: But in a day she fades, though every fold Be duplicated in fine shades of gold. Only where she was born, and only for One creature, will she give up everything Simply because she is adored; and he Must sacrifice himself. The Minotaur, Ugly, exhausted, has no gifts to bring Except his grief. She opens utterly To show how she can match his tears of pain.