Joie de vivre

Paul Bailey was born in South London on in 1937. He won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 and later worked as an actor. Following At the Jerusalem (1967; reissued 2019) he wrote a dozen novels (two of them shortlisted for the Booker Prize) as well as biographies and memoirs. He died in 2024.

‘There is plenty of joy to be had, much of it sensual, in Paul Bailey’s poems ... The opening of the title poem is, like much of the collection, bitter-sweet: “I have a battery that keeps me ticking. / I think I take at least twenty pills a day. / I laugh when I can and weep when I must.” Bailey knows how to deliver a perfect dose of grumpy old man engaged in a parlour game that will come to us all – how many pills do you take of a morning? All this is done in an apparently artless, transparent style that, at its best, reminds me of the poetry of Hugo Williams. The poems can go deeper, too, notably the ones in which Bailey remembers his mother … Illness, the passing of friends and great personal melancholy are trenchantly and wittily described ere. One can only feel that joy is winning out, against the odds.’ – Stephen Romer, Literary Review‘The poems are unpretentious, thoughtful, funny, fresh, with a clarity like unpolluted water … It’s a wonderful book and I keep it close to me, a talisman. “I love and am loved. Oh, it ought to become a psalm, / this catalogue I’m setting down / with measured sorrow and delight / in the very first hour of an April morning.”’ – Ali Smith, Guardian‘The poems never fail to entertain and then to provoke the reader's admiration for their boldness and authenticity … They are never self-pitying, but defiantly affirmative of life even while their author is in the grip of a dread illness. If the novels are pearls, the poems reveal the original speck of grit around which they formed.’ – Timothy Mo, Spectator World