TRUMPETS AT SUNSET

1 5 7 R T R U M P E T S A T S U N S E T D A N I E L H A L L When my sister called to tell me that our mother had just died – she’d been dying, horribly, endlessly, of Alzheimer’s – what she said to me was, ‘‘She’s out of all this now.’’ Even in the shock of absorbing the news I’d been waiting weeks to hear, the opening of Robert Frost’s ‘‘Directive’’ came to mind: ‘‘Back out of all this now too much for us.’’ (Not that I was entirely conscious of it at the moment, of course: it was more like a note in the complex chord.) My sister had perhaps never read a Frost poem other than ‘‘Stopping by Woods,’’ I’m guessing, in grade school – certainly nothing on the order of the strange and dreamlike ‘‘Directive.’’ Is this not part of Frost’s achievement, that he could use the language of ordinary people to write a poem they could never understand? I hardly understand it myself. But in that moment, his poem became , for me, a part of my mother’s death, and her death a part of his poem. Every great poem is an afterlife of the experience – or the energy, let’s say – that brought it into being, as well as a recurring P o e t r y N o t e b o o k : R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e I n t e n s i t y o f L a n g u a g e , by Clive James (Liveright, 256 pp., $24.95) 1 5 8 H A L L Y dream for the reader who remembers it, carries it inside for what begins at some point to seem a lifetime. Clive James’s Poetry Notebook, subtitled ‘‘Reflections on the Intensity of Language,’’ is his tribute to the particular constellation of necessary poems that have sustained him over a lifetime of reading and writing – and writing about – poetry. The stakes for James could hardly be higher: he is now seventy-five and dying of leukemia and emphysema . (He told an interviewer, ‘‘I’m getting near the end,’’ and although this was a few years ago, there’s no reason to doubt the prediction.) He has written and spoken of his imminent death frankly, movingly, and – are only the British capable of this? – without a touch of self-pity. In his ‘‘Spectator Diary,’’ included here, he muses on the death of his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose memorial service in New York he is unable to attend because of his own infirmities. He admits to being envious of the mourners in attendance, and notes the expressions of love in the obituaries. ‘‘What would be said of me when I was gone? I almost was. Why not devote myself to the form of writing that has always mattered to me most?’’ I called him British: he was born in Australia, to be sure, but transplanted himself to England in 1962. This doubleness was to serve him well, or at least to suit him. In one of the so-called ‘‘Interludes,’’ shorter commentaries that serve as hinges between the (often only slightly longer) pieces themselves, he mentions Michael Donaghy, an Irish-American poet who early on settled in London. This observation pinballs to the Australian Peter Porter, who also made his life in London, for which ‘‘Australian critics tended to regard him as a traitor because he went, and British critics as a carpetbagger because he stayed.’’ (An echo of ‘‘Epistle to Miss Blount’’? This book is a cavern of echoes.) And finally to himself: he cultivated something like Porter’s ‘‘nonchalance’’ about such nationalistic pressures, adding, ‘‘I was careful, though, to remember my poetic origins.’’ I would have been grateful for a little more on the subject of his biography – in particular, the e√ects of his expatriation – though his story is told, to the extent that it is, through his taste. He mentions that Frank Kermode had less and less time for theory...