Collected Poems (1958-2015) Read online

  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

  The treetops shudder to silence like coins set spinning.

  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:<
br />
  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:

  Grain blown back like a bugle calling

  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.