The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse, 1958-2003

by Clive James

Verse with all the vivid invention of Clive James' unique prose style, combined with a sense of rhythm, cadence and memorable form that is equally and entirely his own... Following the publication of his 1986 collection, Other Passports, he has emerged as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, going on to publish new works in such mainstream outlets as the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the New Yorker and the Australian Book Review, and now culminating in this updated collection.

Genres: Poetry

461 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

An expatriate Australian broadcast personality and author of cultural criticism, memoir, fiction, travelogue and poetry. Translator of Dante.

Reviews

[Palmyrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a good poem, which is why I so rarely read any poetry. But there are no stinkers – none that I found, anyway – and few clunkers in this collection of Clive James’s career in verse.

Mr James is often cleverer than many readers will be willing to tolerate, and his Ian Flemingish love of scientific and technical terminology, and of unpoetic objects like World War Two fighter planes, will put some readers off – especially if they happen to be female. I don't suppose his general view of things would appeal to many women, anyway. Clive’s a man’s man. That’s okay with me.

Since most of these poems were written in the Seventies and Eighties, there’s a Cold War day-before-Doomsday air about many of them. Reading them today almost makes one nostalgic:

Snow falls again. The atmosphere turns white.
The airfields of East Anglia are socked in.
The atom bombers will not fly tonight.
Tonight the Third World War will not begin.

The earlier verse tends to be shorter, less ambitious and more involved with traditional poetical concerns — that is, with what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. I didn’t care for it so much. The later verse, in James’s mature style, is about just about everything, and it’s brilliant.

A generation ago, London literary pundits debated whether James was even a poet. Hadn’t he started out as a pop songwriter (and a not very successful one at that)? Didn't his embrace of old Italian rhyme-schemes (ottava, terza rima) suggest an unhealthy obsession with technical matters, and perhaps an agoraphobic recoil from the wide open spaces of Modernism? The self-consciousness with which he deployed these metres suggests that he wasn’t too sure about it himself. Being Australian didn’t help, of course.

Still, a poet and a good one is what Mr James indubitably is. And now that he’s translated the whole of Dante’s Commedia, it seems people are willing to accept him as one. Good on old Clive; those laurels were hard-earned. Here's a collection of the work he did to earn them, and it’s brilliant. Buy. Read. Enjoy.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always wanted to write letters in verse. Not sure that this is the greatest poetry but most of it is workmanlike with occasional occasions of unbelief.

[Anna]

The title poem is my favorite.

[Romana Challans · Rating 5 out of 5]

HIs poetry was a revelation. Painful, bittersweet, hilarious....