A Painful Joy

Yeats and Thomas are dead. Eliot sleeps and Auden dozes. Edith Sitwell adds like Penelope another scene to her unfinished tapestry. George Barker sends us grim messages from the snake-pit. In America, Wallace Stevens forpage 322 lack of a better actor, wheels a barrow on stage, and the humourless, faceless schools applaud. At Cambridge young men write small documentary pieces about the street excavations observable from the library window; young women, metaphysically dissect dead birds. In this depressing climate of poetic exhaustion, it is a painful joy – to criticise, rather to celebrate – the selected poems of Lawrence Durrell. This Englishman living in Greece demonstrates with each new group of published poems the controlled power one expects of a great surgeon, or athlete. Faults there may be in his work, as there are spots on the nylon fur of a sea-leopard – obscurities, sheer animal games, facts of private reference – but no other poet now writing in English possesses his power to lay bare, by chiselling a poem to the bone, the nuclear structure of experience –

Love on a leave-of-absence came,
Unmoored the silence like a barge,
Set free to float on lagging webs
The swan-black wise unhindered night
(Bitter and pathless were the ways
Of sleep to which such beauty led.)

This is a complete poem, ‘Niki’, the shortest in the selection. We have seen many different Durrells flash out from the earlier poems – the friend of Greece, the lover complacent or deprived, the tightrope-walker above Niagara – and all of them seemed true in the moment of occurrence; but in his most recent poems he has come to his full strength, as a man too old to enter again the jaws of the social dragon, who speaks from a better and a worse place; as a husband and rejuvenator of the language. We can only regret his ascetic impulse which has made this new selection much too stripped; and in each fresh poem we rejoice.

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