The Ikons and Other Poems

by Lawrence Durrell

Book by Durrell, Lawrence

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1981

About the author

Lawrence George Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for The Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.

The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV.

Reviews

[Daniel Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dying business began hereabouts,
A pewter plain, a shrubless frugality,
An anarch sea, cliffs, nothing.
It promised a local action merely
But the death-rot somehow spread from
Limb to limb and mind to mind,
Became endemic. The body politic
Was touched, began to suppurate once more.
An empire began to have dizzy spells,
One fever to cast out another
One man to cast down another.

Who can apportion a historic fault?
A few hundred years of average misery,
A thousand more of abstract villiany,
The precious culture pilfered into dust.

They spoke of starting again at the beginning
But by then few had looked upon it fresh,
And the frenzied young were building away
From it, towards some tributary death.
A little contempt goes a long way,
Smashed well-head with gorgons
Clothed now with self-renewing moss.