Collected Poems 1931-74

An invitation to make this edition of my Collected Poems (the third) definitive and comprehensive could not have been accepted had chance not put in my way a Canadian scholar, Dr James Brigham, who, in the pursuit of his own studies, had collected and indexed the whole of my published work. He was kind enough to let me profit from his toil, and the editing and arranging of this edition is entirely his work, which has been aided and shaped by the bibliography of Alan G. Thomas. My warm thanks go to both men for this exemplary edition which I would not have been able to assemble unaided.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

1980

This third collection of Lawrence Durrell's poems makes generally available for the first time all of the poems published between 1931 and 1974. The earliest items are now all quite scarce:
Quaint
Fragment:
Poems
Written
between
the
Ages
of
Sixteen
and
Nineteen
(1931);
Ten
Poems
(1932);
Ballade
of
Slow
Decay
(Christmas, 1932);
Transition:
Poems
(1934);
Mass
for
the
Old
Year
(1935). Durrell's first real volume of verse, in terms of availability to the public, was
A
Private
Country
(1943), and it was followed by
Cities,
Plains
and
People
(1946) and
On
Seeming
to
Presume
(1948).
Deus
Loci
(1950) and
Private
Drafts
(1955) marked a brief return to private, limited editions, but Durrell has
remained
a truly public poet since
The
Tree
of
Idleness
(also 1955). That volume was followed by
Selected
Poems
(1956); the first
Collected
Poems
(1960);
Selected
Poems,
1935–1963
(1964);
The
Ikons
and
Other
Poems
(1966); the second
Collected
Poems
(1968);
Vega
and
Other
Poems
(1973), which included the poems published in
The
Red
Limbo
Lingo
(1971); and
Selected
Poems
(1977). All the poems published in these volumes are collected here, as are those poems which were published in little magazines but which were never collected. However, poems published as integral parts of plays or novels are not included, nor are poems which exist only in manuscript form.

My two goals in compiling this edition have been to give the reader a sense of the publishing history of Durrell's poems, and to retain the sense of intimacy which the arrangement of poems in earlier editions has given.

The poems have been arranged chronologically by year of first publication. Two dates are given beneath each poem: the date on the left is the year in which the poem was first gathered by its author as part of a volume of verse; the italicized date on the right is the year of first publication. Poems which were originally dated by the poet retain those dates, in parentheses, beneath their titles.

Over the years, and for various reasons, many of the original
dedications
to the poems had been removed; they have been restored in this edition. Similarly, original author's or prefatory notes which had been either pared down or completely excised have here been reinstated. Finally, epigrams from Georges Blin and Mila Repa which appeared
in first editions as ‘keys to a mood' but have not appeared in collected editions have been slipped into this edition in their original
chronological
settings.

JAMES A. BRIGHAM
 
Okanagan
College

1980