614
PARTISAN REVIEW
but sentient and trenchant haunter of beach, apartment, museum and
theater. One must compare him with Wilbur and the other sociable
wits; yet his voice is quite distinct. We may be too suspicious of so
much melopoieia, so much "music" (dread word!) in a poet of this
seriousness. When since Browning has that not been so (says the shade
of "Willy" Yeats)? Moss establishes a poetic vista or scene, elaborates
it
with a great variety of means, then quietly points to the worm i' the
bud. He seeks a subtle euphony and variety of the full-bodied, secular
phrase, often of literary ancestry, avoiding what has been aptly called
the
mythus ex machina
and the apparatus of inspirational ecstasy. In
Stevens' phrase, his verse goes "downward to darkness on extended
wings." He can be movingly right in "A Gift to be Simple" (a tribute
to Albert Einstein) and memorably sardonic in "Small Elegy." Serious
as he is, technique rather than temperament is the major interest. He
is not quite a Heine or Laforgue; we hear certain loud silences. Like
the storm he describes, his verse is often half coloratura and half
caesura, with a center of gravity well apart from the confessional ego.
Can he
really
be all compact of loving appreciation, satisfying memories,
compassionate insight and forgiving irony, as he appears in this collec–
tion? Does he never want to
epater
a bourgeois, commit some high un–
consortable breach of comprehensibility like Empson's splendid "Bac–
chus"? Such unmannerly questions get asked of any poet as successful,
as exotically sane, as Mr. Moss.
Lawrence Durrell, as poet and novelist
(The Black Book, Justine) ,
critic and travel-book writer, seems to have forged ahead of most of
the postwar poets with whom he was first anthologized; and by force
of exile, long brooding on Mediterranean scenes and Alexandrian themes
(influenced, doubtless, by Cavafy, Montale, etc., the Latin erotic poets,
and Byron ), to have emerged as a figure who begins to challenge Graves.
He comes out of the Auden-Oxbridge atmosphere and continually falls
back into it even in his best and latest poems. He is softer and gentler
than Graves, but equally virile in his duskier, intellectual and feline
way. Nothing, however, is very stable so far in Mr. Durrell, not even
the virility, which can seem put-on at times. There's an
airy,
old-shoe,
slap-it-up note in his work which may be why the
Times Lit. Sup.
finds
that "There is no nonsense in Mr. Durrell." Perhaps not; but there is
something suspiciously like it. Here, in toto, is his "Niki":
Love on a leave of absence came,
Unmoored the silence like a barge,
Set free to float on lagging webs
The swan-black wise unhindered night.
