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        Pete Atkin >> Words >> Opal Sunset
        
(Message started by: Tiny_Montgomery on Today at 21:59)

Title: Opal Sunset
Post by Tiny_Montgomery on Today at 21:59

I can highly recommend Clive's latest, Opal Sunset - Selected Poems 1958-2008 (Picador, £12.99). I believe selected and individual, structured collections are the best place to read verse, and this applies to Opal Sunset. Apart from the verse, the book's worth getting for the introduction alone, which is almost the equivalent of Clive James's poetic manifesto, opening with: "During fifty years of writing verse, I have never wavered from the conviction that the self-contained poem is the thing that matters," while concluding that "The poet has to stay. The poet is a lifer." Finely put.