Literary return of the Kogarah Kid Clive James

In his final months, Clive James longed to see Australia again. In a new anthology of his favourite poems and commentary, he writes a tribute to his homeland.

Clive James at work on his poetry.

In his final months, Clive James longed to see Australia again. In a new anthology of his favourite poems combined with commentary, he writes a “tribute to his homeland”, which gave him “against all the odds, an awareness of poetry, a feeling for it”.

After surveying the work of the greatest poets across several centuries and on multiple continents, he returns to Australia where “the Man from Snowy River still rides”. He recalls Banjo Paterson, Dorothea Mackellar, James McAuley, AD Hope, Judith Wright, Kenneth Slessor and Les Murray, and how they shaped Australian identity.

“When I myself come back it will be in a box of ashes, but I chose the right spot to be born, just as I chose the right profession — poetry — and followed it to the end,” James writes.

In a postscript about growing up in “poetical Australia”, the renowned expatriate presenter, critic, essayist, novelist and memoirist writes of how the landscape itself inspired the greatest of homegrown poets.

“Australia spreads out indefinitely while only rarely piling up, and even then it seldom piles high: occasionally there are a few bumps the size of the Cotswolds, but never even a single Himalaya,” he describes.

The Fire of Joy, by Clive James.

“From space, which begins at low altitude, there is not much down there except rock, with stretches of scrub for variety. At the edges there is some green country, but it soon runs into the surf. More often than not it is hot and bright enough to burn your skin. The whole layout looks as if it were dreamed up by Dorothea Mackellar — ‘I love a sunburnt country’ — except that she makes it too exciting.

“The place is huge: as big as America. But you have to search hard to find anything going on. There is a terrific urge to get not much done.”

The Fire of Joy, published by Pan Macmillan next week, is a deeply affecting book that blends autobiography with literary criticism, and is filled with James’s trademark breezy erudition and wit. It was written while he was recovering from cancer surgery and as his eyes were failing him, and completed before his death last year.

The Kid from Kogarah discovered poetry at school. He recalls that before going home each day, students had to stand beside their desk and recite a learned poem. “Perhaps because the reward for success was freedom, I thought of poetry, forever afterwards, as my ticket out: the equivalent of hiding in the laundry in the truck out of the prison camp,” he writes. It was at the University of Sydney that he decided to become a poet.

James includes roughly 80 poems for the 80 years that he lived: from William Shakespeare and John Donne to Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, from Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, TS Eliot and Rudyard Kipling, to Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. “The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life,” he writes.

Each poem is joined by commentary and critique as James deconstructs the verses, explains their technique and meaning, combines amusing personal anecdotes and metaphors, and directs the reader to further reading and analysis.

The book is dedicated “to the next generation” with a wish that they take up the writing and reading of poetry. James encourages readers to read poems aloud — “to get on his or her feet and declaim” — and includes rules for how to master delivery and stir an audience.

It is indeed a joy to read, and savour.

Clive James’s The Fire of Joy: Roughly Eighty Poems to Get By Heart and Say Aloud is published by Pan Macmillan.