Download or read book Opal Sunset Selected Poems 1958 2008 written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A generous helping of [James’s] very best, guaranteed to lift the spirit and raise the eyebrow.”—Billy Collins Opal Sunset marks the exuberant introduction of Clive James’s poetry to an American audience. Praised after the publication of Cultural Amnesia as one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, Clive James is now, with the publication of this collection, being granted recognition as the poet he has always been. For much of his long career it was hard to realize that James’s gift for poetry underlay his achievements in other fields. First as a television critic on Fleet Street, and later as a television personality in his own right, he achieved such fame for writing the way he spoke that his poetry was regarded as an idiosyncratic sideline, as if no celebrity could write worthy verse. A conundrum presented itself: how could a serious poet also be a television star? But for James, a duty to the discipline of verse was always fundamental, and his accumulated poetic output became impossible to ignore. As early as the 1970s, James’s long, mock epic “Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World” received almost unprecedented attention in his adopted England, while later, his satirical short poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” became not only a standard verse quoted at fancy dinner parties but entered the culture as lines to be memorized by unpublished writers everywhere. James was suddenly in the odd position of having written famous poems well before he became a famous poet. Finally, the publication of a volume of his collected verse, The Book of My Enemy, earned him in 2003 the reputation as a serious poet that he has long deserved. Less inhibited by fixed categories, a new generation of critics has confirmed what James’s public has instinctively known, that he brings his poems to life with all the resources to be found in his prose: wit, imagination, social observation, and a dazzling play of language. In addition, his poems have an unmistakably characteristic rhythm that makes it compulsory to read them aloud. Switching between strict stanzas and free forms as the occasion suits, James brings a compulsively readable coherence to either mode; and always, over and above the binding force of his metrical assurance, there is a lyricism that brings even the plainest statement to extra life, and which often enters deeply into realms of human emotion. His later poems about the tragedy that struck his mother and father, for example, show an intensity of regret that mark his maturity as a poet and bring out his unashamed nostalgia for his homeland, Australia. Opal Sunset is a treasure chamber of epigrammatic jewels to which the reader will return again and again.
Download or read book Opal Sunset written by Clive James and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opal Sunset gathers together fifty years of Clive James's poetry, and will undoubtedly enhance his reputation as one of the most versatile and accomplished of contemporary writers. Indeed - as with Other Passports, The Book of My Enemy and Angels Over Elsinore before it - Opal Sunset proves Clive James to be as well suited to the intense demands of the poetic form as he is to prose. Readers new to his verse will not be surprised to find him a master of the comic set-piece and surreal excursion, while those who are familiar with his previous collections will already be aware of his fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope. Ultimately, however, the highest recommendation one can give is that Clive James is, in these poems, unmistakably himself - an assured and dazzling wordsmith.
Download or read book Collected Poems 1958 2015 written by Clive James and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems” (Spectator) of Clive James are collected in this decades-spanning volume. The poetry of Clive James has been delighting readers and winning awards for decades. His recent poems looking back over his extraordinarily rich life have brought him an even wider readership; some, such as “Japanese Maple” (first published in The New Yorker), became global news events upon their publication. In this first collected volume of poetry, James makes his own selection from over fifty years’ work in verse: from his early satires to his late poems of valediction, he proves himself to be as well-suited to the intense demands of the short lyric as to those of the comic excursion. Collected Poems places James’s effortless fluency, his breath-taking thematic range, and his emotional power on full display—and will burnish his reputation as one of the most accomplished of our contemporary poets.
Download or read book English Literature for the IB Diploma written by David James and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For students studying the revised Language A Literature syllabus in English for the IB Diploma. Written by experienced, practising IB English teachers, this new title is a clear and concise guide to studying the revised Language A Literature syllabus in English for the IB Diploma. Available in print and e-book formats it covers all parts of the Language A Literature programme at both Standard and Higher Levels, and contains a wide variety of text extracts including works originally written in English and World literature in translation. Integrated into the coursebook are information and guidance on assessment, Theory of Knowledge opportunities, Extended Essay suggestions, and activities to help students read, think, discuss, write and present ideas.
Download or read book Opal Sunset written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2008 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired, through his vast reading, by the poetic voices of the past, yet always speaking in a voice unmistakably his own, Clive James ineffably combines humor and great tragedy (but never solemnity) to create poems that are at once traditional yet engagingly fresh.
Download or read book Book Review Digest written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Digital Talking Books Plus written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nefertiti in the Flak Tower Poems written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving.”—Edward Mendelson Clive James’s renown as an internationally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection “steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats” (London Times). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks—as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. Despite the dizzying variety, James’s poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in “Numismatics”) to striking new coin, and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, “whose play of light pays tribute to the dark.”
Download or read book The Divine Comedy written by Dante Alighieri and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a translation of Dante's allegorical poem.
Download or read book Australian Literary Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Yorker written by Harold Wallace Ross and published by . This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Talking Book Topics written by and published by . This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The River in the Sky A Poem written by Clive James and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this deracinated age appears a miraculous epic that pays homage to Dante and Camus. “Few people read Poetry any more, but I still wish to write its seedlings down, if only for the lull of gathering: no less a harvest season for being the last time,” writes Clive James in his epic poem, The River in the Sky. What emerges from this lamentation is a soaring epic of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, all the more extraordinary given its appearance in an age when the heroic poem seems to have disappeared from contemporary literature. Among James’s many talents is his uncanny ability to juxtapose references to early twentieth-century poets with “offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), or allusions to the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony contrasted with references to “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis.” Whether recalling his Australian childhood or his father’s “clean white headstone” in a Hong Kong cemetery, James’s autobiographical epic ultimately helps us define the meaning of life.
Download or read book The British National Bibliography written by Arthur James Wells and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 1922 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poetry Notebook Reflections on the Intensity of Language written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary poet and critic Clive James provides an unforgettably eloquent book on how to read and appreciate modern poetry. Since its initial publication, Poetry Notebook has become a must-read for any lover of poetry. Somewhat of an iconoclast, Clive James gets to the heart of truths about poetry not always addressed, “some hard” but always “firmly committed to celebration” (Martin Amis). He presents a distillation of all he’s learned about the art form that matters to him most. James examines the poems and legacies of a panorama of twentieth-century poets, from Hart Crane to Ezra Pound (a “mad old amateur fascist with a panscopic grab bag”), from Ted Hughes to Anne Sexton. Whether demanding that poetry be heard beyond the world of letters or opining on his five favorite poets (Yeats, Frost, Auden, Wilbur, and Larkin), his “generosity of attention, his willingness to trawl through pages of verse in search of the hair-raising line, is his most appealing quality as a critic” (Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal).
Download or read book Inferno written by Dante Alighieri and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's immortal vision of Hell shines "as it never did before in English verse" (Edward Mendelson) in Clive James's new translation of Inferno. The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of Hell, confronting its many threats, macabre punishments, and historical figures, before reaching the deep chamber where Satan himself resides. Now, in this new translation, Clive James communicates not just the transcendent poetry of Dante's language but also the excitement and terror of his journey through the underworld. Instead of Dante's original terza rima, a form which in English tends to show the strain of composition, James employs fluently linked quatrains, thereby conveying the seamless flow of Dante's poetry and the headlong momentum of the action. As James writes in his introduction, Dante’s great poem "can still astonish us, whether we believe in the supernatural or not. At the very least it will make us believe in poetry."
Download or read book Cultural Cohesion The Essential Essays written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clive James presents the "prequel" to his celebrated Cultural Amnesia, forty-nine essays that form a cultural education in one brilliant volume. Following his much-heralded publication of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents here his "prequel"-forty-nine essays, which he has selected as representing the best of his half-century career. Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in a volume that is not only erudite but also endlessly entertaining. Dividing his book into four sections-"Poetry," "Fiction and Literature," "Culture and Criticism," and ''Visual Images"-James comments on poets like W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, novelists like D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler, and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich. Book jacket.
