Many of this book’s 37 poems feel built to last, including “Lecons de tenebres” — lessons of darkness — in which Mr. James seems to speak not merely for himself but for so many who have allowed career and ego to fizz too freely at the front in their minds. This poem includes these lines:

The mirror holds the ruins of my face

Roughly together, thus reminding me

I should have played it straight in every case,

Not just when forced to. Far too casually

I broke faith when it suited me, and here

I am alone, and now the end is near.

All my life I put my labour first.

I made my mark, but left no time between

The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst,

With no life, there was nothing I could mean.

This poem ends with the poet sensing what “the years have brought/A fitting end, if not the one I sought.”

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

This would not be a Clive James book if it were not also replete with offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations. In one poem, while in a hospital, he catches a Sylvester Stallone movie on television and comments, “No-one grits/Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering.”

Most of the keepers in “Sentenced to Life,” however, are the poems that wring meaning from addressing the time the poet has left. In “Event Horizon,” he writes:

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase

When everything about you goes downhill?

This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze

And feel its grandeur, even against your will,

As it reminds you, just by being there,

That it is here we live or else nowhere.

His other recent book is “Latest Readings,” a collection of essays in which the author revisits favorite books and takes the temperature of some new ones. “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out,” he tells us, “you might as well read until they do.”

Mr. James made a vow to himself, he remarks early on, that his book-buying days were over. He breaks this vow instantly, of course. Nearly every essay in this collection describes a haul from his favorite used bookstore in Cambridge, where he lives, or from the online seller AbeBooks.com.