$36.99
Following a terminal diagnosis and a confrontation with his approaching death, Clive James began to write furiously. Collected together for the first time in The Light as it Grows Dark, the poems which resulted from this unexpected late flowering address memory, ill health, ageing and legacy.
James at all times admits fear and refuses sentiment, meditating not only on the end of his life, but on the end of the writer’s life, one lived, by necessity, half in retrospect. ‘Look hard at this’, he advises in one poem, ‘you should do your best to give / All your attention now.’ Elsewhere, the refrain of the title poem echoes as a snatch of memory remembered at the end: ‘The light as it grows dark has come for you / to comfort you . . . Your life has turned to look you in the face.’
Equally solemn and good-humoured, The Light as it Grows Dark is a moving and magisterial work of consolation in the tradition of Seneca, and a capstone to James’s extraordinary career.
LICENSING AGREEMENT
