[Penguin Modern Poets 1]- Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Jennings, R.S. Thomas
Penguin Modern Poets was a series of 27 poetry books published by Penguin Books in the 1960s and 1970s, each containing work by three contemporary poets (mostly but not exclusively British and American). The series was begun in 1962 and published an average of two volumes per year throughout the 1960s. and beyond. Each volume was stated to be "an attempt to introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader, by publishing some thirty poems by each of three modern poets in a single volume. In each case the selection will be made to illustrate the poet's characteristics in style and form."

This was a new departure; publishing contemporary poetry in paperbacks and so should be lauded for making the poems affordable to many, being priced originally at 2 shillings and sixpence (half a crown). I must certainly have been able to afford them as I have managed to track down nineteen of them on my bookshelves. I have certainly not read them all, but a few do bear some notes that I made at the time. They are of a nice size to slip into a pocket and I usually took one of them away on holiday. One of them still bears the stain and the faint smell of sun tan lotion and brings back fond memories. Most of the books now have a fairly battered appearance and reading again this first volume has resulted in a few pages coming away from the binding.

I remember being excited to buy them the first time around and then being a bit dismayed when I got around to opening them, to discover that some of the poets were writing in a style or language that I could not get to grips with and so although we can congratulate the publishers for making the poems available, a few paragraphs serving as an introduction would have been useful. After all the aim was to introduce the poets to the general reader. The approach here seems to have been "just print the poems". They are nicely spaced out with each poem starting on a new page and there is a list of all the poems at the front of the book.

The first poet in the first collection is Lawrence Durrell who is perhaps not the easiest of poets to appreciate and by the time the general reader had got to his third poem 'Carol on Corfu' he may have found himself as all at sea as I was. Remember in the 1960's no internet connection to help with background knowledge and any Encyclopaedia to hand would not have covered contemporary poetry. Information easily available today would alert the reader to some of Durrell's themes. His ability to connect the past with the present, his love of Greek mythology and his ability to evoke the atmosphere of Greece and its islands; its light its colour and its nature and of course the sea. He sometimes looks at life with amusement, but death is also not far away and he is a poet who feels his his aloneness in the world, love seems to be important, but ephemeral I think that all this is expressed in my favourite poem from this selection:

This unimportant morning

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.

Day rings in the higher airs
Pure with cicadas, and slowing
Like a pulse to smoke from farms,
Extinguished in the exhausted earth,
Unclenching like a fist and going.

Trees fume, cool, pour - and overflowing
Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake
Carpets from windows, brush with dew
The up-and-doing: and young lovers now
Their little resurrections make.

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep
Stitched up - and wake, my darling, wake.
The impatient Boatman has been waiting
Under the house, his long oars folded up
Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

In many of Durrell's poems there are stanzas of vivid beauty and thoughts that coalesce with the atmosphere he has created. Other poems where he achieves this are Sarajevo and A Water-Colour of Venice. I have on my shelves his collected poems and I love his novels that form the Alexandria Quartet. I have to acknowledge that some of his thoughts in his poems and his novels still remain just out of reach for me; I can almost see them but they remain just out of focus, but that is the beauty of poetry.

Elizabeth Jennings is represented by thirty poem here and I think she is more approachable than Durrell. She is said to be a religious poet and although I do not share her faith this does not prevent me from enjoying her poems. She is noted for her so-called emotional restraint, but this does not stop her from tackling highly emotional subjects for example her poem entitled 'For a Child Born Dead' where typically she keeps her distance from the event itself but still expresses thoughts that are quietly caring. She was a poet that paid great attention to the form of her poems making them a joy to read. She is also a poet who can lead the reader by the nose through a poem and then suddenly in a couple of lines take away the ground from under your feet, making you think outside of the box that she has created for you.

Here is one of her most popular poems included in this selection

My Grandmother

She kept an antique shop – or it kept her.
Among Apostle spoons and Bristol glass,
The faded silks, the heavy furniture,
She watched her own reflection in the brass
Salvers and silver bowls, as if to prove
Polish was all, there was no need of love.

And I remember how I once refused

To go out with her, since I was afraid.

It was perhaps a wish not to be used

Like antique objects. Though she never said

That she was hurt, I still could feel the guilt

Of that refusal, guessing how she felt.

Later, too frail to keep a shop, she put

All her best things in one narrow room.

The place smelt old, of things too long kept shut,

The smell of absences where shadows come

That can’t be polished. There was nothing then

To give her own reflection back again.

And when she died I felt no grief at all,

Only the guilt of what I once refused.

I walked into her room among the tall

Sideboards and cupboards – things she never used

But needed; and no finger marks were there,

Only the new dust falling through the air.


This is another poet that has become a favourite of mine and I also have her collected poems.

The final poet is R. S. Thomas and he seems to be the most approachable poet of the three. His poems in this collection could be summed as: Life is hard for a peasant farmer and he can look forward to a lonely death especially if he lives in Wales. Ok I know that this is a bit flippant as some of his poems can reach right to the bone. Women do not figure much in his poems and a couple of his poems verge on misogyny. The search for the fertile earth in barren conditions seems the lot of Thomas's peasant farmers. The poems are in sharp contrast to the two previous poets and seem to belong perhaps to an older generation. Here is a poem simply entitles Song:

We, who are men, how shall we know
Earth's ecstasy, who feels the plough
Probing her womb,
And after the sweet gestation
And the year's care for her condition?
We, who have forgotten, so long ago
It happened, our own orgasm,
When the wind mixed with out limbs
And the sun had suck at our bosom;
We, who have affected the livery
Of the times' prudery,
How shall we quicken again
To the lust and thrust of the sun,
And the seedling rain?

A nature poet who saw life in the raw: R. S. Thomas seems to be celebrating the hardness of life. He says at the end of his poem entitled 'A Peasant':

Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

Looking back and re-reading or perhaps reading some these poems for the first time I feel that these books are a treasure trove for poetry lovers. One hopes that the series as a whole did introduce contemporary poets to a wider audience, they certainly broadened my horizons as a young man and these battered, ink stained little poetry books are among my favourite books on my shelves. This volume 1 was a great start to the series, introducing three great poets who stamped their individual genius through all the poems here: 5 stars ( )

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