BOOKS
135
The variations on vowels and consonants could not be prettier. And
the imagery of boats, sky, silk, and sea put against the cicida inside
the girl's clothes is wonderfully suggestive-think what Pasternak
would have done with this situation, for example. But Mr. Durrell
lets it die in its pretty language, in the easy exoticism of May and
fig leaf and the sweet sadness of being a poet.
Mr. Christopher Logue writes about important things like sex
and the atomic bomb, but poems- as Mallarme observed-are
made with words, and Mr. Logue is very weak in raw materials. He
tries to dress up his drab and unmusical language with Elizabethan–
isms and various cliches of modern poetry, but the result is rather a
clumsy pastiche than a style. Example from the love poetry: "Child,
I am no Elizabethan hack/Spicing his dalliance in a sonnet's pot";
from the bomb poetry (a newsy- To S. Eliot has just gotten mar–
ried-attack on the elder poets)
So do you agree with them,
Spender, and Barker, and Auden?
And you, my newly-married master, Eliot–
Will you adopt their lie
by
silence,
And having sold our fles.h to war
Bequeath our bones to God?
The book includes translations of Pablo Neruda and a section of
Mr. Logue's translation of the Iliad, which is too determinedly
modern in an old-fashioned way to be readable: "From a duck's
egg, a duck. Doubtless his relative Scamander/Will cleanse this
dead, wet, wreck of an obstinate man. / A River king came in his
mother's slit so, proud of it,/He went for me." But no amount of
turgid Elizabethanism plus modern slang, however, is a substitute
for a style of one's own.
Mr. Ted Hughes seems a more interesting writer than Mr.
Logue, but he seems to be as fatally attracted to modern
poetry as Mr. Durrell is to lovely language and Mr. Winters to
purity. The influence of Marianne Moore: "Underwater eyes, an
eel's/Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter" (though
in the same poem will be something as un-Marianne Moore-and
un-anything-as "Blood is the belly of logic"). Of Yeats: "My
sires had towers and great names,/And that their effort be brought
to an edge/Honed their bodies away, dreams/The tramp in the
