News at Eleven: Vertical Envelopment, published in December

last year, revealed that [Clive] James had been hospitalised twice during the preceding months, first with a serious bout of emphysema ("The way I smoked, thank Christ it wasn't cancer"); and later, in New York, after being "felled" by a blood clot. The same poem makes a glancing but ominous reference to the poet's "CLL/Leukaemia that might hold off for years". Slow-moving as this form of the disease may be, it still sounds like something one would prefer not to have. Subsequent poems suggest that the battered Kid from Kogarah is in far better shape now although still on "meds".

Its interesting that James should have chosen poetry to write about these crises.

from The Australian: The kid grows up

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