Nefertiti in the Flak Tower Poems Author:Clive James ?Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving.??Edward MendelsonClive James?s renown as an internally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection ?steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats? (London Ti... more »mes). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book?s breathtaking range of themes: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks?as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. But despite dizzying variety, James?s poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe.« less