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Light as it Grows Dark

Clive James
€21.99
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A01=Clive James
ageing
Australia
Author_Clive James
bereavement
broadcaster
Category=DCA
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Category=JHBZ
Clive James
contemporary
death
dignity
dying
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
greif
grief
legacy
loss
meditative
poems
poetry collection
poignant
terminal illness

Product details

  • ISBN 9781037406478
  • Dimensions: 130 x 197mm
  • Publication Date: 08 Oct 2026
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Description

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.
About Clive James
Clive James was a polymath. Not only a prolific and much-loved broadcaster on television and radio, he was also the author of over forty books, including collections of literary criticism, cultural essays, travel writing, poetry and novels. As the legendary TV critic of the Observer from 1972 to 1982, he invented a new genre, subjecting high- and low-brow programming alike to the same scrutiny: serious, funny, deft, and endlessly quotable. His hilarious and poignant autobiography Unreliable Memoirs has never been out of print since being published in 1980. Cultural Amnesia, his best-selling almanac of twentieth century thought and culture, is an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that prepared the times we live in now. His translation of the Divine Comedy was published in 2015, his Collected Poems in 2016. He was born in Australia in 1939 and died in England in 2019.

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