SOMEWHERE BECOMING RAIN – CLIVE JAMES

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from the much-loved writer Clive James to one of the world’s most cherished poets: Philip Larkin. This is the finest critic of his generation on the best poet of his lifetime – The Times Clive James was a life-long admirer of the work of Philip Larkin. Somewhere Becoming Rain gathers all of James s writing on this towering literary figure of the twentieth century, together with extra material now published for the first time. The greatness of Larkin s poetry continues to be obscured by the opprobrium attaching to his personal life and his private opinions. James writes about Larkin s poems, his novels, his jazz and literary criticism; he also considers the two major biographies, Larkin s letters and even his portrayal on stage in order to chart the extreme and, he argues, largely misguided equivocations about Larkin s reputation in the years since his death. Through this joyous and perceptive book, Larkin s genius is delineated and celebrated. James argues that Larkin s poems, adored by discriminating readers for over half a century, could only have been the product of his reticent, diffident, flawed, and all-too-human personality. A collection to savour two-fold – for the genius of Larkin and the playful erudition of James – Financial Times