Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008

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.

The New York Times - David Orr

It isn't necessarily an advantage in the poetry world, especially the American poetry world, to be known for writing things that aren't poetry. We're suspicious of dabblers…on the whole this is a wry and pleasingly exacting collection. That fact alone will never establish whether Clive James is, somewhere down in the tangled strands of his DNA, a True Poet, but the work gathered here makes it plain that whatever James may be, he knows how to write poems worth reading.

Clive James, author of the best-selling Cultural Amnesia and of Opal Sunset, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.