[ilds] Standing on Milos

[Wilson, Fraser]

Splendid !!

 

 

Perhaps it would be fruitful and timely to share some of the poetry
which has moved us most - or indeed that we have written  ? ( worry not,
I have none to inflict upon you )

 

 

What I have been doing, while not writing poems, is reading South Wind
and enjoying it thoroughly. I know that the Durrell - Douglas issue has
been touched upon lately, but does anybody 

 

know of evidence that Durrell had contact with any of Douglas's material
prior to Prospero's Cell ?  If so, I can only imagine that it would have
informed the kind of book he was 

 

trying to write.  

 

 

I am aware that Douglas's style was conversational whereas Durrell was
more descriptive. The characters in South Wind seem utterly irrelevant
beyond the realisation that 

 

the book must contain a few in order for dialogue to take place.
Douglas's voice speaks through all. Towards plot it is rightly said that
there is little more than a gesture, 

 

but it is the consistency in quality of the writing - and the humour -
that is outstanding.  Patrick Leigh Fermor could function at this level,
but in Larry's case - I feel  - the gems, although exquisite 

 

are scattered more widely.

 

 

The dialogue returns time and again to the 'moral' expectations of
society  - that had recently derailed Douglas's own life in spectacular
fashion - but it does not seem to grapple with them in any way. 

 

It is as if the cerebral pathology that inflicts shame or regret were
mercifully absent and the writer was at peace with himself for better or
worse. 

 

 

If I tasked myself to extract the quotable material from South Wind, I
feel that I would end up with a manuscript almost as long as the
original. I haven't thought that about a book since reading Francis
Bacon's 

 

Essays.

 

 

Best wishes,

 

Fraser

 

 

 

________________________________

From: ilds-bounces at lists.uvic.ca [mailto:ilds-bounces at lists.uvic.ca] On
Behalf Of Denise Tart & David Green
Sent: 16 April 2009 22:36
To: Durrel
Subject: [ilds] Standing on Milos

 

  

Standing on Milos

 

 

I could have gone to Corfu

to the fecund green of Western Greece.

Instead, I ended up on Milos where the moon like landscape

and spring scented flowers gave a lending hand to the volcanic sleep

and wonderful, slow pace.

 

wine and wench inspired vagrant, that Lawrence Durrell, 

writing his blue and sun-washed praise, 

preferred greener lands:

the nymph groves of the Corcyra, 

voluptuous folds of the Marine Venus, 

sea sucked, rising from the foam of Rhodes

and the Gothic hills of Bellapaix, to this sparse land,

empty of taverns and noble friends

- "a damnable hole of a place!" 

 

But, to go to Greece in Spring was a Godly gift,

running up every hill and diving into the sky

or down into the wine cold sea,

retsina coloured in the sandy shallows 

below the hazy blue where islands circle like sun warmed ghosts

from the ancient world; Delos the grass grown city remembered.

 

A land where donkeys amble to market,

peasants astride with wicker saddle baskets hanging with onions,

to an Easter ceremony in the silent night of narrow streets

with the voices hushed and strange,

and the candle flames straight up in the breathless air,

and the procession led by eastern beards with incense swinging,

slow orbs of smoke.

Not so much orthodox but pagan;

roasted animals eaten later, the Lamb of God,

The goat of older times.

 

The Greeks eat real food

and drink wine freely without pretentious talk of grapes.

They smoke where they like and never stop

yet never start - unlike the English and their stop, start

bullshit television and media nightmare recipe shows.

 

Give me the stony, white, stark, hard blue

and spring flower scented Aegean islands, 

the gorse and yellow broom,

where the peasant, stones and gnarled olives trees 

cannot easily be told from each other in the fading light

as the salty fishermen beat the octopus on the sea wall by the pier.

 

 

These rocky islands, like a good poem, well honed, 

where less is more and the stanzas of life are told, 

windswept and swirling

like the Cyclades themselves coming out of the blue like awareness
itself.

 

How can men be so stupid as to clamber about galleries

when one can just stand above Klima in Milos

and feel the centuries where the shepherd is the artist

and the goats paint the music with the wind?

 

 

 

Words by David Green and Roy Hedges, compiled by David Green 

Denise Tart
Civil Celebrant - A8807
16 William Street
Marrickville NSW  2204
+61 2 9564 6165
0412 707 625
dtart at bigpond.net.au

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