Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell
Peter Porter was born in Brisbane and has lived in England since the early 1950s. His Collected Poems appeared in 1983.
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India, to an English-Irish family. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first collection of poems was followed by the three Island books, Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemon, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, the Alexandria Quartet, completed in Southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Caesar's Vast Ghost, his reflections on the history and culture of provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommires in 1990.