The Light As it Grows Dark: The Last Poems of Clive James

Beautiful and deeply meditative poems on illness, ageing, legacy and death from one of Australia’s finest writers.

To be a long time dying is largely a phenomenon of modern medicine. The Light As It Grows Dark is reportage from this new country; hard-won revelations about the journey’s end: ‘This insane last phase/ When everything about you goes downhill.’

A poet long before he was a journalist or broadcaster, Clive James was 70 when his health irretrievably broke down, and his world contracted to a single book-lined room looking out on a small walled garden. Every detail in this restricted orbit seemed to be filled with meaning, and he found that once again poems began, unstoppably, to flow.

Admitting fear and resisting self-pity, he meditated on the nature of life when its end is in view. ‘The light as it grows dark has come for you / to comfort you . . . Your life has turned to look you in the face.’

A capstone to James’s extraordinary career, The Light As It Grows Dark is a wry, tender, unsentimental companion for all those who will find themselves, at some point, towards the end of their lives, which is to say for all of us.