134
KENNETH KOCH
of putty and gold./A smokeless arc of Latin sky./One star, less than
a week old" and, at his best, "rosy as feet of pigeons pressed/In
clay." Sometimes Mr. Durrell is able to sustain a simple and sensu–
ous declarative style for the length of a poem, as in "This Unim–
portant Morning," which begins
This unimportant morning
Something goes singing where
The capes turn over on their sides
And the warm Adriatic rides
Her blue and sun washing
At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs ..
and which is lovely, in its quiet, somewhat old-fashioned way.
But Mr. Durrell's poetry cannot do what Mr. O'Hara's does so
effectively-that is, communicate ideas and complexity of feeling
by means of words sensuously perceived and employed. Mr. Dur–
rell's sensitivity to language seems to
be
chiefly to the physical shape
of words, no matter what they mean or who has used them before.
The surface of his poetry is pleasant if one can stop thinking, but
its intellectual and metaphorical content is not strong enough to
tease us out of thought. Mr. Durrell never writes ugly lines, but he
does write some empty ones, and some which are just entirely
in
someone else's style (most often middle Auden: "For Time does
not heed its own expenditure"; "Awkwardly enclosing the com–
monwealth of his love"). And I would guess it is the pleasure he
gets from the sound and surface of such a poem as "At Rhodes"
which enables
him
to let its exciting metaphorical possibilities expire
in very flat lines:
Anonymous hand, record one afternoon
In May, sometime before the fig leaf:
Boats lying idle in the sky, a town
Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,
Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,
A sheet of glass leading down into the sea.
.. _
Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:
Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister's cloak
In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.
Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,
Conspire and join each other here,
In twelve sad lines against the dark.
