Injury Time

The lower depths of London today are brilliantly eviscerated in Ben Judah's This Is London, an Orwell for our grim times -- Roy Foster, <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>, Books of the Year 2017 Injury Time heads the latest/last collection of his poems, which are rightly heralded as 'a major literary event'. Though the title's sporting metaphor is characteristic, it has very little to do with 'sport'. The poems are as widely ranging and inventive as ever, both in their form and their content. They range daringly from a splendidly substantial celebration of the deaf Beethoven to various self-revealing meditations on his own carcinoma. The latter can be admired at full strength in 'Night-Walkers Song', but his playful wit and imagination are as ever wonderfully varied -- Katherine Duncan-Jones, <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>, Books of the Year 2017 James's recent poems . . . represent the very best work James has ever done in verse -- Jason Guriel * New Republic * Here are these amazing works, highly praised, technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems reflecting gratefully on a life . . . James's famous voice twinkles even in his weakened state -- Douglas Murray * Spectator * James has approached the time of his vanishing with grace and good humour, not sentimentality or anger. These poems are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive * Financial Times * A fresh volume of poetry describing the joys of the bonus years the great polymath has been given by medicine, determination and love * Evening Standard * James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational -- Joan Bakewell * Independent * A worthy successor to his 2015 collection, Sentenced to Life . . . Injury Time, on the whole, reminds us that James is, and has always been, a poet of clarity and control. His mastery of metre and rhyme is indisputable . . . Some of the more personal ones about his looming-but-deferred death have so much in common with the tone and diction of late poems by John Donne that it can seem as if the intervening four centuries had never happened . . . If Injury Time proves to be James' last collection (as it well may not) it will be a more than memorable testament to have left behind * Sydney Morning Herald * James as always been a fine poet with a considerable mastery of traditional forms as well as a marked capacity for the elegiac . . . But the peculiar and defining quality of Injury Time is that the sense of mortality is all at once intense and leisurely . . . this is not the verse of a part-time player, this is the work of a man who presents himself as having nothing but poetry left . . . Injury Time is a significant achievement and lasting testament to a man who is a marvel of a wordsmith and who in the face of a death sentence that has allowed him injury time has written some of his best poems . . . this is a book by a true artist. It will ring in the ears and tug at the heart of any reader -- Peter Craven * The Australian *