[ilds] Durrell's Complete Poems

[James Gifford]

Hi Bruce,

Jay Brigham retired near to where my parents live (just across the river 
from me now), so I had a chance to talk with him about his work.  His 
labour collecting all the variants of the poems and working with Durrell 
to finalize them was extensive, so any project would really be adding to 
rather than remaking his edition -- Durrell oversaw the final 
inclusions, exclusions, and last revisions to that edition.

That said, convincing Faber to redo an edition they don't really keep in 
print reliably and containing poems already available in their other 
Durrell publications (CVG) might be a hard pitch.

Personally, I'd like to see a variorum of the poetry, which would be an 
even bigger undertaking.  It's not as big a task as Marianne Moore, but 
it's significant, and some of the variant publications of the poems are 
almost entirely different works.

The new Eliot editions through JHUP really are a massive project, 
thankfully available in digital editions through Project Muse, and 
unsurprisingly published just as Eliot's works entered the public domain 
in several countries...

All best,
James

On 2016-07-18 10:55 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> As everyone surely knows, Durrell’s poetry begs for an edition of his
> complete poems, 1931-1990.  In 1980, Faber published James A. Brigham’s
> revised edition of the poetry from 1931-1974.  Durrell continued to
> write poetry after 1974, much of it very good.  I especially like the
> last poems in /CVG—/they glow with a sad and mysterious light.  In 2006,
> Faber published Peter Porter’s edition of Durrell’s /Selected Poems,/ a
> mere fragment of the corpus but containing an interesting introduction
> by a highly respected poet, who calls Durrell “one of the best of the
> past hundred years.”  For all that, I don’t think Porter fully
> understood or appreciated Durrell.  A complete edition with annotations
> would also be most helpful (the kind that Ricks and McCue have recently
> done for T. S. Eliot) .  But given Durrell’s fallen reputation, I doubt
> Faber would support such a massive undertaking.
>
> Bruce