[ilds] Durrell's Complete Poems

[Bruce Redwine]

James, thanks.  James Brigham did a great service for Durrell’s poetry (the dating is very helpful).  His edition of the collected poems is a standard reference, but it needs to be updated to include all the poems since 1974.  Unless someone is a true believer, who has access to all the poems in all those various compilations and appearances in separate publications?  A variorum edition is an excellent idea.  Someone also needs to annotate the poetry, to show its relationship to the prose, to track down the allusions, to bring a little light to the “darkness,” and to explain the poetry in the context of Durrell’s life and development.  Maybe I’m really talking about a monograph, The Art of Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry, or some such.  Anyway, the first order of business is to make available all of Durrell’s poetry in one volume or complementary volume.

Bruce





> On Jul 18, 2016, at 11:42 AM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

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