Walking home recently under grey skies, I stopped to watch the afternoon light fail. I could have looked at my phone for comfort, but I found myself instead listening to Shakespeare spooling through my mind, words not remembered since school but intact, beautiful, despairing:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.

This was a gift. I breathed easier, bathed in the vitality of poetry, the saturation of meaning that gives it weight. The aptness. I needed this.

And I knew just the book I needed. It was not Shakespeare; it was a recent dazzling collection with much to give – and a collection I had read in haste. Now I was in need of grounding, and I had nothing but time.

I went inside and pulled Sentenced to Life, by Clive James, from a shelf.

Don’t be misled by the slimness of this volume. It is the poetic equivalent of the tiny, concentrated energy rations marathon runners take to keep going, when the end is not yet in sight.

Clive James loved slim volumes of poetry. In his 2014 collection, Poetry Notebook, he described the thrill of finding them secondhand when he was younger. He knew that young poetry enthusiasts still seek this pleasure. Aware how ill he was, he wanted, by not simply writing poetry but writing about it, to transmit his “gratitude for the neatness and the concentration of the slight volume densely packed with memorable meaning”.

This was his belief: that concentrated meaning should be the aim of the poet, that this intensity made poetry a separate and valuable thing.

He was right. Poetry may be the antidote to what many of us feel: we are glued to screens, numb with fear, lost in elastic expanses of time. Poetry’s density can steady us. It contains worlds.

Sentenced to Life delivers a big bang of meaning and connection, rich space to explore if we are equal to the challenge of discovery, if we will take the time.

These poems are not heavy or difficult but they are profound. They take on the important themes – mortality, love, regret, exile – and speak to us of grief and loss, of uncertainty.

The collection was meant as a farewell and a reckoning of sorts – James tells us this – but the poems have everything we expect from him: lightness of touch, effortless mastery of form, erudition, clarity, wit. A thread of kindness runs through them as well. They are a joy to read.

The poet may present himself as “a sad man, sorrier than he can say” in the poem that gives its name to the collection, but he is still the writer who for decades made us laugh, and think, and occasionally stare with disbelief at where his enthusiasms took him. A man “in whom life is abundant”, to borrow Unamuno’s line, with his considerable qualities and all his attendant shortcomings.

He still makes us laugh, with fresh images like this: in My Latest Fever, actor Sylvester Stallone stars with other action heroes in the poet’s feverish hallucination and grits his teeth as the going gets tough:

No-one grits
Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering.

But mostly James surrounds us with beauty in these poems. That is where the joy in reading them resides, how they comfort us. One of them, Japanese Maple, became famous on its own before the collection was published.

Easy to see why, with its filigree images celebrating the maple tree in his garden, a gift from his daughter:

When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Its leaves will “turn to flame”, the beauty of the autumn foliage and the turning seasons enduring:

A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

The temptation is to keep quoting. It’s futile, but I take this away: we can enshrine transcendent moments in our hearts and cherish them. We must, for they are fleeting, as is our time here.

This then, to end, from Spring Snow Dancer:

Snow into April. Frost night after night.
Out on the Welsh farms the lambs die unborn.

[…]

My granddaughter, as quick as I could glance,
Did ballet steps across the kitchen floor,
And this time I was breathless at the chance
By which I’d lived to see our dear lamb dance –
Though soon I will not see her anymore.

• Vicki Laveau-Harvie is the author of the Stella prize winning novel The Erratics, out through HarperCollins

• Sentenced to Life by Clive James is available in Australia through Pan Macmillan