Clive James on his late flowering: ‘I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I’m about to die and then don’t’

Clive James has published a new poem days before we meet. It opens, ‘Your death, near now, is of an easy sort’. It is about a Japanese maple his daughter has planted in the garden of his Cambridge home where we are sitting, and whether the poet will live to see the leaves flame red this autumn. The poem has made news.

‘At the moment,’ he says, laughing, ‘I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t. My wife is very funny on that subject.’ It is part of an astonishing late body of work. This month there is a new book of writing on poetry, Poetry Notebook. He still hopes to live to see a new Collected Poems out next year, perhaps finish a final volume of memoirs and write a sequel to his immense 2007 work Cultural Amnesia.

‘Although I have only got half my energy I am probably writing at the rate I always should have. But other things got in the way. I liked those other things, I don’t blame them for getting in the way. But I am in ideal conditions now so there is no excuse for not getting on with it. The only drawback is I don’t really know when it will all get switched off. You see the trouble with this thing, I have a lot of things, as you can hear, but the one that you can’t see is the one that’ll get me, it’s a brand of leukaemia. It’s a nifty little fella. It can get beaten into remission, but it gives no indication of when it’s coming back. When it comes back, that’s when you have to fight. My chest I fight all the time. I have only just finished a bout of pneumonia — any infection turns to pneumonia almost instantly but the leukaemia will put a limit on things.