Those lines might have a plainsong-like simplicity on first reading (or first listening – these poems should also be read aloud), but the music is more complex than that. A finely wrought technique is at work: the chime of ‘n’ in lines six and seven; the soft intakes of breath in the caesuras from line eight; the internal rhymes that echo with the more obvious end-rhymes: pale/frail, Japanese/anemones, leaves/trees. Or just the thing he does with his mouth (and ours) in the vowels of line two. Among these trade secrets of formal verse, perhaps the most difficult is also the most difficult to explain: how to make the music flow conversationally? And unobtrusively.

Unobtrusiveness has not necessarily been Clive James’s forte – at least when working in the non-poetic genres. Epigrammatic shock and awe are more his method. The shock of the joke? The building blocks of everything he writes are aphorisms, or epigrammatic jokes – but aphorisms and jokes are also a species of poem, and require similar attention to timing, cadence, compression, precision. The title, Sentenced to Life, is both an epigram and a black joke, itself. Plenty more follow, often of a characteristically paradoxical character: ‘His body that betrayed you has gone on / to do the same to him’; ‘My death is something I must live with now’; ‘[I] go to bed with so much still to say / On how I came to have so little time’: ‘I am restored by my decline.’

‘The building blocks of everything he writes are aphorisms, or epigrammatic jokes’

But I don’t want to quote more single lines. These are lower-temperature one-liners, embedded in poems where every line has to do its share of the heavy lifting. Single lines don’t jump off the page, or out of the poem, and interrupt the flow in a spectacular Schwarzenegger/condom-full-of-walnuts manner.

‘Spectacular’ is a word I nicked from that aforementioned essay, ‘A Deeper Consideration’, in which James takes a typical knight’s move jump from John Berryman into Shakespeare: ‘there is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient distortions, including the poet’s own gift for … words.’ Or protected, more explicitly (and more spectacularly) from ‘the threat posed by the spectacular expression that outruns its substance’.

Clive James

For Shakespeare read James; this is clearly a core threat to his own writing. He has given it a lot of thought and in the process made some usefully left-field connections between, for example, Shakespeare and Wittgenstein. It is also, surely, the reason why poetry attracts him more than any other literary form: it offers a way to tame his extraordinary and often anarchic verbal and comic facility.

Yeats famously said that we make poetry ‘out of the quarrel with ourselves’. These later James poems offer plenty of evidence, and not only of a quarrel with his own gift for words – or with the dying animal he finds himself fastened to. His most deeply considered quarrels are with his conscience. He wrestles it to a standstill in ‘Holding Court’, another outstanding poem. No soft-breathing inhalations or Japanese anemones here; set to the terse music of a bespoke Spenserian stanza, its pentametric sentences are implacably Yeatsian in their diction:

Be pleased that things are simple now, at least,
As certitude succeeds bewilderment.
The storm blew out and this is the dead calm.
The pain is going where the passion went.
Few things will move you now to lose your head.
And you can cause, or be caused, little harm.
Tonight you leave your audience content:
You were the ghost they wanted at the feast
Though none of them recalls a word you said.

In another Poetry Notebook essay, James quotes the late American poet–critic Michael Donaghy’s notion that a living poem can only emerge from a ‘negotiation’ with an imposed formal requirement. Those requirements are not necessarily a rhyming, or even rhythmic, formality. Donaghy ‘always insisted that even Howl was not the Whitmanesque “barbaric yawp” that Ginsberg claimed, but a carefully worked and reworked artefact’. James has allowed himself what looks like a yawp in free-range poems such as ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’, but on closer inspection the comic riffs are still fitted to a formal rhetoric. Form, in other words, follows function.

An opposite emotion to schadenfreude runs through this new book: a renunciation of the vanities of celebrity, the signing queues, the groupies – and implicitly of enemies with shorter queues and remaindered groupies. Dying has put that in proportion, if not quite at risk of self-schadenfreude: my own book has been remaindered and I am glad.

‘Give me maturity or give me death,’ James writes in another context – but perhaps dying brings a final kind of maturity. He has set aside his ‘jester’s mask’, but when it comes to setting things aside it is Shakespeare who comes to mind, as our latter-day Prospero prepares to ‘abjure the smooth magic’ of his own words and to lay down his nibbed wand. Like Prospero, James is also seeking forgiveness. Whether that comes or not is a private matter, but there is a progression in the placement of these poems from self-flagellation and self-pity towards resignation, and acceptance – never better put than in the closing passages of ‘Transit Visa’, or the quite beautiful ‘Star System’, in which the poet might be addressing himself from a more objective place, in an orbit far, far away:

There was a time when some of our young men
Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,
As stunning as the sun. The years since then
Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.
It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw
The Saturn rockets going up as if
Mankind had energy to burn. The law
Is different for one man. Time is a cliff
You come to in the dark. Though you might fall
As easily as on a feather bed,
It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.
You dream that you might keep it in your head.
But memories, where can you take them to?
Take one last look at them. They end with you.

To which the only response can be that reliable criterion: Wow! There are plenty of others of that quality: ‘Sunset Hails a Rising’, ‘Balcony Scene’ – and of course ‘Japanese Maple’, which went viral after its publication in the New Yorker. Recently, I heard it read by Miriam Margolyes on stage in Adelaide, as part of her one-woman-show. Sandwiched between passages from Dickens and Shakespeare, it held its own in the wow-stakes.

‘To which the only response can be that reliable criterion: Wow!’

Beneath the rising tide of regret, guilt, and resignation in the book, there is also that Jamesian (he can code-share the adjective with Henry) undertow, tugging him back to the lost paradise of childhood. Poetry Notebook offers an essay on the last poems of John Updike, another writer who possessed a spectacular, protean talent – and struggled at times to contain it. In my own favourite poem from Updike’s last book, he writes nostalgically of Shillington, his hometown that ‘forgave me for existing’: ‘Perhaps / we meet our Heaven at the start and not / the end of life.’ James has never forgotten his own childhood heaven, whether in the sunlit closing lines of ‘Sentenced to Life’, or in poems such as ‘Manly Ferry’, which bring to mind earlier pieces such as the much-anthologised ‘The Lions at Taronga’.

It will take time for the dust to settle on the Clive James legacy – it crosses all the literary boundaries and then some, and steps on a lot of toes. There are those who think he wasted his immense literary talent writing (spectacular) gags and appearing on television. They should be so funny. As for television: ‘Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world,’ James once wrote – and of critics of his yawping talent I sometimes think the same.

Meanwhile, there is still a little magic in the wand. This might be his last volume of ‘memoirs’, but not of poems.Others have appeared since, including in this journal. Last Poems, The Sequel? I hope so. Not to mention Cultural Amnesia, Volume 2. Or (my own ridiculous pet hope) a left-field book on Shakespeare? James has been very sick for some time, but to coin a joke of the black, paradoxical type I know he likes: long may he die.