Clive James announces new poetry collection – Injury Time

The much-loved broadcaster, critic, memoirist, novelist and poet Clive James was not expected to live for long after his short-poem collection Sentenced to Life was published, to great acclaim, in 2015. But Picador has announced that it will publish its sequel, Injury Time, in May.

James was diagnosed with leukaemia, kidney failure and lung disease in 2010. In 2012, the celebrated wit told a BBC interviewer: “I don’t want to cast a gloom, an air of doom, over the programme, but I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.”

Sentenced to Life’s valedictory poems met immediate acclaim. In his Guardian review, Blake Morrison wrote: “How many last words, deathbed aphorisms and funeral songs can his public take? Quite a few is the answer, when they resonate as these poems do at their best”, and the book went on to be the UK’s bestselling poetry collection of 2015.

But his treatment has been far more successful than expected, as James has chronicled in his Guardian column, Reports of my death.

Talking from his Cambridge home about the poems in Injury Time, James said: “I felt like I’d dodged a bullet, and when you’re dodging a bullet the best thing you can do is turn it into a dance. This is a very different book. When I wrote Sentenced to Life, everyone thought I was dying. But the new drugs are working and the danger now is that I’ll bore everyone to death. There’s no more drama. Perhaps I need to stage regular road accidents.”

Injury Time records the poet’s determination to use his remaining time wisely, to capture the treasurable moment, and to live well while the sense of his impending absence grows ever more powerfully acute. The new poems range from childhood memories of his mother to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight. He also writes of his Australian birthplace, where he hopes to “reach the end”, while reflecting on the consolation and wisdom to be found in art, music and books.

The title’s sporting allusion was chosen because “Injury Time is something you’re rewarded with because of what you’ve been through,” he said.

Asked for some lines that suggest the mood of the new book, James offered three from This Being Done, inspired by seeing children setting off for school in winter: “The morning comes, and through the spread of snow / In candy-coloured coats the children go. / Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.”

“I was thinking of life when I wrote it,” said James. “And I used to be a child once.”

The author has allowed the Guardian to reproduce the whole poem below.

This Being Done

Behind the trees across the street the sun
Takes down its last pale disc. This being done,
No soft pale light is left for anyone.

There is a further comedown in the night.
Outside, unheard, asphalt is turning white:
White swarms of butterflies in the streetlight.

The morning comes, and through the spread of snow
In candy-coloured coats the children go.
Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.

• Reproduced by kind permission of Clive James and Picador