On the Volcano

COLLECTED POEMS (288pp.)--Lawrence Durrell--Dutton ($5).

To be a poet, some say, is to live more intensely than other men. By such a definition, Irish Author Lawrence Durrell must live continuously atop a volcano of awareness. His recent four-decker novel of Egypt's Alexandria--which opened with Justine and closed with Clea--is a ferment of emotions and evocations of place that already ranks with the best sensuous and sexual writing of the decade, if not of the century. In it the poet was constantly overriding the novelist and giving an intrinsically imaginative setting and characters a febrile quality that owed more to Durrell's soaring imagination than to his knowledge of life as it is normally lived, even under the incubating Mediterranean sun. It has taken two decades to bear out T. S. Eliot's belief, formed in 1938, that young Durrell was a white hope of English prose. What is just as plain, now that his Collected Poems are published, is that Durrell is one of the few first-rate poets presently writing in English.

Durrell says that writing poetry takes too much out of him, and so it might. In a time when most poets settle for expert technique as an envelope for cliches of feeling, his technical expertness serves simply as a firm mold for flashing pools of moving truth. While reams of well-wrought verse make do with themes that could as easily serve historians, sociologists, geologists or psychoanalysts, he seldom tackles anything less easy than a challenge to poetic insight. Like all poets he has his quota of failures, but even there his sense of language, when it cannot save his intentions, still saves his music.

The Durrell range is as wide as his restless experience of life. Father of two daughters, he writes charmingly of children "Cast down like asterisks among their toys," and as a veteran of stormy marriages and the creator of smoldering Justine, it is not surprising to find him writing:

. . . Woman

Can be a wilderness enough for body To wander in: is a true human Genesis and exodus. A serious fate.

She the last crucifixion on the Word. We press on her as Roman on his sword.

To Durrell, places are poetry, especially those of the Mediterranean world which is the seedbed of his vision. But he has his own way of remembering them. Now he is in Athens:

At last with four peroxide whores

Like doped marigolds growing upon this

balcony,

We wait for sunrise, all conscripted From our passions by the tedium and

spleen, While the rich dews are forming . . . or at a Greek church in Alexandria, which he sees . . . sinking in sound

And yellow lamplight while the arks

and trolleys And blazing crockery of the orthodox

God

Make it a fearful pomp for peasants, A sorcery to the black-coated rational, To the town-girl an adventure, an ad venture.

Too many of the Collected Poems are baffling, partly because Durrell is at no great pains to let the reader into the recesses of his feeling, partly because, as in his novels, he frequently lets the richness of his language blur meaning entirely, and sometimes because his line of thought (especially in the longer poems) becomes fuzzy or even careless. But he can throw a sharp defining dart:

Truth's metaphor is the needle, The magnetic north of purpose Striving against the true north Of self . . . or share such wisdom as he feels can surely apply to all men in every time:

Give love with all its tributary patience That when the case of bones is broken open,

The heart can bless, or the sad skin of

saints Be beaten into drumheads for the truth.

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