Rupert Owen reviewed Collected poems. by Lawrence Durrell
Review of 'Collected poems.' on 'GoodReads'
1 star
This collection was part of a revised edition of Faber & Faber publications collated by Durrell in a casual fashion. Having enjoyed Durrell's prose, I thought I might dip into his poetry. Not for me, I'm afraid. To be perfectly honest, I needed heavy annotation with these poems, not just a dictionary. Either by Lawrence or someone else. Much of the geographical, mythological, political, historical linguistic referencing was lost on me. I also found the surrounding metaphor or lyrical symbolism too fragmented and oblique to get a satisfactory feeling or picture of each poem's purpose. I noticed that when I did reach for my dictionary, pretty much all the words I found myself looking up were technical terms. Each time I ran aground on a word, it was a technical definition. It made me wonder if Lawrence purposefully chose these technical words to sound cleverer or to make the poem …
This collection was part of a revised edition of Faber & Faber publications collated by Durrell in a casual fashion. Having enjoyed Durrell's prose, I thought I might dip into his poetry. Not for me, I'm afraid. To be perfectly honest, I needed heavy annotation with these poems, not just a dictionary. Either by Lawrence or someone else. Much of the geographical, mythological, political, historical linguistic referencing was lost on me. I also found the surrounding metaphor or lyrical symbolism too fragmented and oblique to get a satisfactory feeling or picture of each poem's purpose. I noticed that when I did reach for my dictionary, pretty much all the words I found myself looking up were technical terms. Each time I ran aground on a word, it was a technical definition. It made me wonder if Lawrence purposefully chose these technical words to sound cleverer or to make the poem sound more meaningful because in most cases they clashed with the other words used and frankly could have been substituted with better choices. The verse feels stilted, overly constructed and if I have to be honest, somewhat affected. This left me quite detached from it. By page 251, I found a couple of notable but whimsical poems I liked but nothing to quote.