The book is dedicated to James’s wife, Prue Shaw, but is hardly a verse letter. There are several touching reminiscences of their early life together – made more poignant by James’s often penitential tone, the cause of which remains unmentioned. The poet’s two daughters, however, are ‘Like commandos from a rubber boat / On a secret mission / To murder me with guilt.’

For some readers, James’s associative, non-linear strategy here will be disconcerting; for others it will be a vivid evocation of what may pass before the eyes of a drowning man, as the cliché has it. As befits the polymath that James is, the subjects range from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture and evoke many of the key moments in twentieth-century art, especially in opera, ballet, cinema, symphonic music, and, occasionally, jazz.

A few elements are poignantly recurrent. One is his childhood in Kogarah, New South Wales, minus his father, who was killed in an aircrash on the way home after being held as a POW in Japan. Many poets have a loss in their early lives from which they never fully recover. His father’s death is James’s. It’s been at the centre of a number of his poems, most notably ‘In Town for the March’. By page eight of The River in the Sky,it has reappeared. A ‘roulette wheel in Las Vegas’ make James think that ‘The B24’s propellers / Churning sunlight on Okinawa / For the flight meant to bring / My father home / Are like the collars of the priests / Heads threaded through the sun’s disc / Or that tambourine the moon.’

This fiercely visual dimension in The River in the Sky is at times almost surreal. ‘Gliding is what I do / Here at the finish, in the final hour,’ James says. ‘It will be this way between the star clusters, / In the gulf between the galaxies.’ The lyrical reach here is a long way from the Larkinesque restraint that has distinguished James’s previous late-life poems. Some readers may see this as a loss of control; others as the genuine flights of a man in extremis. Both could be right.

Certainly there are times, however, when James is not particularly lyrical. He has always been a discursive poet – and an entertaining one. At least one of his anecdotes – about the singer Lotte Lenya – spins off into an unsupported attack on another major artist. He declares Bertolt Brecht, for instance, to be ‘As phony as a two-bob watch’ and claims he was ‘an utter bastard to his women’. Admittedly, poetry is hardly the medium for exhaustive proofs, but neither is it the place for cut-and-run jibes. Brecht was far from an ideal human being, but he came up with a deal of memorable work (especially his poetry – which is often overlooked).

Clive James (photo by Teri Pengilley)

Naturally, all memoirs by celebrities will risk name-dropping. James remembers his friendship with the conductor Georg Solti, for instance, and offhandedly comments: ‘He was a lovely man though. Last time I saw him / Was at Buck House for a Royal Birthday.’ It does sound a little inflated, especially for the ‘Boy from Kogarah’. An encounter with another sort of royalty sets off a comparable echo: ‘On the flight from Singapore / Straight down to Perth / When Elle Macpherson / Crossed the aisle to sit beside me / The impact of her beauty / Was exactly like / A mugging from a naiad.’

Of course, there are other times when James’s encyclopedic memory is more directly entertaining. It’s hard, for instance, not to be amused by James’s account (via Alberto Manguel) of the Grand Vizier of Persia who ‘Travelled with all his books / (He had 117 thousand of them) / They were carried by a caravan / Of 400 camels trained to walk / In alphabetical order.’ It’s the dinner-party side of the Jamesian persona.

It’s worth noting, however, that much of The River in the Sky is set within extensive mythological frameworks, including those of classical Greece, Pharaonic Egypt, various parts of the Middle East and the pre-Columbian Americas, among others. This all helps to reinforce the poem’s cosmological reach and perhaps to make it more convincing as a variety of hallucinatory experience.

For all its asides, wisecracks, jokes, and self-serving reminiscences, The River in the Sky is indeed what its underlying metaphor claims. Its last five lines, which may well be the last to be published in a book while the author is alive, display a convincing and affecting equanimity: ‘I thought that I was vanishing, but instead / I was only coming true: / Turning to what, in seeming to end here, / Must soon continue / As the rain does the moment that it falls.’