Prepare the way - at the end of a strange and challenging year, eleven Tablet reviewers choose books to sustain and inspire as we journey towards Christmas

PIERS PLOWRIGHT
What does one need for the season of Advent – and never more than this year? A book to lighten the darkness, I suggest. And I have just the thing: Clive James’ final collection, put together, with the help of his daughter, in the last months of his life: The Fire of Joy: Roughly Eighty Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud (Picador, £20; Tablet price £18).

“For me poetry means freedom,” James writes in his introduction. “Even today, in fact especially today, when the ruins of my very body are the prison, poetry is my way through the wire and out into the world.”

And we go with him, from Anon to Wyatt, reading aloud if we can – some very helpful author’s “Rules on Reading Aloud” supplied – from the poetic choice of a very individual talent and taste: there’s Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Bishop, G.K. Chesterton, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and James’ great hero Philip Larkin, as well as the more unexpected Billy Collins, U.A. Fanthorpe, Stephen Edgar and Norman Cameron, and the unfashionable Ernest Dowson, Rupert Brooke and Dom Moraes. What links them all are Clive James’ typically witty, sometimes abrasive and always passionate comments. It’s a book to dip into and ponder in this bleak midwinter.