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Red Door Books is next week releasing the first biography of Clive James to focus on his poetry. The book follows closely after the writer and broadcaster’s death this month at the age of 80.
Out on 2nd December, Ian Shircore’s So Brightly at the Last follows James’s 60-year poetry career, from early successes like “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” to recent popular works like “Japanese Maple”, “Sentenced to Life” and his last epic, “The River in the Sky”.
Shircore first got to know Clive James in 1970, when he was running a folk club in west London. In the last four years, Shircore spent afternoons at James’s Cambridge home, talking with him about his lyrics, poetry and prose. That led to 2016’s Loose Canon: The Extraordinary Songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin (Red Door), alongside the new book.
According to Red Door, James read a pre-publication copy of So Brightly at the Last, calling it “a wonderful book – energetic, informal and beautifully written”.
Red Door said: “In the book, James talks for the first time about his nightmare experience of being locked up in a mental hospital for two months – with the Trouser Thief and the Woman with Only One Song – when the drugs went wrong and caused a severe psychotic reaction. He also explains why he turned his back on his lucrative TV career and how his 10-year battle against leukaemia, emphysema and several other life-threatening conditions led him to focus his energy on the poems that have established him as ‘a major minor poet’.”
Publisher Clare Christian acquired world rights in all languages direct from the author.
James passed away peacefully on Sunday after a long illness. Picador announced yesterday that a final poetry book compiled by James, The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud, will be released in autumn 2020.