Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

Collecting verse written in the years 2008-2011, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower sees Clive James approach his later years with the same technical versatility, emotional poignancy and lightly-worn erudition as defined his career. Across a breathtaking range of themes, there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later W.B. Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters and sharks - as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. What marks this collection out is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in 'Numismatics') to striking new coin; in Nefertiti in the Flak Tower each poem is a twin-sided balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, 'whose play of light pays tribute to the dark'. Clive James (1939-2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collection Sentenced to Life and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy , both Sunday Times bestsellers. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook , and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy . Praise for Clive James: 'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times 'Wise, witty, terrifying, unflinching and extraordinarily alive' - A.S. Byatt, critic and author of Possession: A Romance 'Clive James is a true poet' - Peter Porter, London Review of Books