Clive James

Clive James talks to Paul Farley and reads his new staring-death-in-the-face poems. The Echo Chamber returns with new poems on the old subjects. Clive James has been a poet throughout his life as well as a literary critic, memoirist and television pundit. He didn't expect to be alive to see his new collection Sentenced to Life after illness and old age took him in their grip a couple of years ago. But, against the odds, he's still with us. And his recent poems are extraordinarily clear-eyed and fearlessly moving. He manages to be light throughout whilst remaining, as one critic put it, deadly serious. Producer: Tim Dee.