A PAINFUL JOY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 13

A PAINFUL JOY

SELECTED POEMS, by Lawrence Durrell; Faber and Faber, English price 10/6. Y EATS 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 snakepit. In America Wallace Stevens, for 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 climaté of poetic exhaustion, it is a painful joyto 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 experienceLove 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.

James K.

Baxter