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        Pete Atkin >> Words >> Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
        
(Message started by: Tiny_Montgomery on Today at 20:51)

Title: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Tiny_Montgomery on Today at 20:51

Clive James will publish his next poetry collection from Picador in April. It's called Nefertiti in the Flak Tower (whatever would Philip Larkin have made of THAT title?) A new poem called 'On Reading Hakluyt at High Altitude,' which will presumably be featured in the book, is included in the March issue of Standpoint magazine.

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by dr_john on 29.02.12 at 15:13

Here it is.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/text-march-12-new-poetry-clive-james-on-reading-hakluyt-at-high-altitude

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by dr_john on 11.04.12 at 10:34

Clive was on Front Row last night 10.4.12, being interviewed about NITFT (should be available on i-player soon).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qsq5

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Tiny_Montgomery on 30.04.12 at 11:58

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is positively reviewed by Derwent May in the latest issue of Standpoint. (The first review so far, I believe.)

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Kevin Cryan on 30.04.12 at 14:01

Here is a link (http://standpointmag.co.uk/books-may-12-never-a-dull-verse-derwent-may-clive-james-poetry-nefertiti-in-the-flak-tower?page=0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0)

I believe it got some mention of it in a recent edition of The Express, or maybe The Mail. I'm not quite certain which.

Kevin Cryan

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Revelator on 08.05.12 at 18:16

The Telegraph has also listed it in "The best recent poetry: May 6"
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/9246089/The-best-recent-poetry-May-6.html):

'There is an elegiac feel to Clive James’s Nefertiti in the Flak Tower (Picador, £14.99). In “Fashion Statement” the old Aussie confesses: “This year I almost died.” The poem loops back to when he was “young and Sydney shone”. He and his friends, wearing the first T-shirts, used “flash wordplay” to attract the girls. They didn’t know it then but: “Searching for words we who wrote them down/Might not have looked it, but we owned the town.” James’s verse is both allusive and alluring – a rose is a “slow-motion cyclone of sheer loveliness” (“Spectre of the Rose”). However, the highlight of the collection is “Vertical Envelopment” in which a hospital ward at night becomes a Dakota full of airborne soldiers waiting to jump on D-Day.'

Hopefully some positive press will be a welcome change after the tabloid nonsense of the past two weeks.

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Revelator on 02.11.13 at 06:16

A rather late, ambivalent review from Open Letters Monthly (http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-nefertiti-in-the-flak-tower/)--here's the opening:

Quote:

There’s something strange in Clive James’ insistence on being a poet. He’s the fiercest polymath and autodidact still living in the Republic of Letters, author of a great autobiography (Unreliable Memoirs), a great novel (Brilliant Creatures), a great essay collection (Cultural Amnesia), and, in the teeth of his critics, a great translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But through it all he’s also consistently published poems and collections of poems, including his latest, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, and he’s done so without any change in his tone, much less the change of tone readers have come to associate with contemporary poetry. His verses adhere to metrical rules Edmund Spenser would have recognized on sight, and they have actual subjects that range beyond the last four random things the poet happened to see, and they have rhetorical aims that are neither reductive nor juvenile. James is sharing the same hardcover-poetry market with writers like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins (indeed, Collins provides a blurb for this current book), but compared to what they do, he might as well be writing in Martian picto-glyphs.

Title: Re: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Post by Revelator on 04.12.13 at 02:03

The PBS Newshour has just published an excellent interview, titled "Clive James on turning his 'last time on earth' into a writing wellspring." The content is mostly focused on Nefertiti in the Flak Tower and includes audio of James reciting "Whitman and the Moth."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2013/12/clive-james-on-turning-his-last-time-on-earth-into-a-writing-wellspring.html