Durrell unreticent

..

And poetry, you once said, can be a deliverance

And true in many sorts of different sense,

Explicit or else like that awkward stare,

The perfect form of public reticence.

I would guess, after a while,

many of us know our short list

of writers, to whom we return

for a kind of revitalising vis-

it, only to turn up more than

we originally discovered. Dur-

rell is securely on that list

for me; and he is not a stored

pleasure, for this reason. He

is almost a surrogate conversa-

tionalist, but I do appreciate

his distinctiveness. He is not,

to put it mildly, a pet.

I would not like to be in any

position of seeming to offer a

boast for Lawrence Durrell. I'm

unhappy with such things, espe-

cially for practitioners in his

art of writing. A lover of mine

from Paris sometime back once

replied, to one of my exuberant

praises, But I had nothing to do

with it. Durrell had everything

to do with how he wrote, but not

with what he gave it.

Lawrence Durrell

Selected Poems

  Portfolio

  fragment

Peter Porter, editor

op. cit.

Clément Chabernaud