POETRY

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27796, 22 October 1955, Page 5

POETRY

The Tree of Idleness and Other Poems by Lawrence Darrell. Faber and Faber. 48 pp. Poems with Flute. By Lewis Sowden. Robert Hale. 68 pp.

These two books are at opposite ends of the poetic spectrum—Lawrence Durrell is an Englishman, who draws most of his inspiration in Southern Europe, the Greek islands and the Middle East; he is at home among ideas and religions whose very existence most neople do not suspect. Lewis Sowden is an English South African, to some extent anchored to the South African scene, but in the manner °£ j° ur nalist, the story-teller, and the collector of local colour. Unlike Mr Durrell, he woud probably take the word “esoteric” to be an insult. In their verse the comparison goes further; Mr Durrell is essentially a ™ an . letters and works at his era ft with great love and application; Mr Sowden is the amateur, the Sunday poet, who dashes off (so his poems read) verse-tales likely to amuse and to instruct.

Readers who have met Mr Durrell in the anthologies and remember the ‘Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson” will not find such irreverent wit and bawdiness in this volume. But those who have made him their guide to the little-known islands and towns of the Eastern Mediterranean will find a great deal to please them. The impact of place is strong in most of these poems—not simply a locality, but the combined impact of place, idea and associations. Where place and associations are fairly well-known already, Mr Durrell writes poems which could have an immediate relevance to a great number of people. “A Water Colour ' of Venice” takes a city familiar in reputation if not in actual experience to many people, and proceeds from this common fund of knowledge to a particular and individual statement. The same is spectacularly true of “Sarajevo,” possibly the best poem in the book. Here the poet deploys his skill in acute and interpretative description against a background of history which every reader must be familiar with. The result is a poem of - considerable subtlety which makes an implicit comment upon more than the 1 town or the Great War, but upon human history as such. Where these conditions do not obtain, where place, idea and associations are quite esoteric, the result may be annoyance and bewilderment. Sometimes, too, Mr Durrell’s extreme compression of language puts needless barriers in the way of even the best-intentioned. and most painstaking reader. “The Dying Fall’’ provides a good example. Two stanzas • of perfect clarity and control are followed by two which do great violence to the normal sequence of words and the structure of sentences. A meaning can be extracted from them, but not a meaning which would appear to demand such a cryptic shorthand. Remoteness and obscurity aside, however. this is an excellent volume. It is the work of a conscientious professional equipped with a style at the same time individual and very adaptable. Neither the difficulties nor the delights of Mr Durrell will be encountered in the second book. Lewis Sowden’s poems exist at a much more everyday level. They neither startle nor perplex; they possess no hidden meanings, they may be fully understood upon one reading; perhaps, as a result, they are often not very satisfying. The book’s curious title, we are told, means that the poems should be read as if there were a flute playing in the background. Whatever this explanation may, in its turn, signify, it should not be taken to imply any lyrical quality in these poems. Rather, they are the literary equivalent of the “yarn.” If there is any music in the background, it is that of the banjo. The verse is hot particularly skilful; it employs a limited technique of short staccato lines, half-rhymes and assonances. These features, and the avoidance of any obvious iambic thumping, is announced by Mr Sowden to be a daring exercise in modrrnitv which it is not. For modernity. we must turn back to Mr Durrell and his techniques of elision and suggested statement. If it is assumed that Mr Sowden occupies a fairly lowly niche in the poetic pantheon, then some enjoyment may be taken from his poems; there are some stories worth telling, and some glimpses of Africa worth seeing. But there are only a ; few places in the book where one ; can be sure that verse is not being ; employed on a task better left to prose.