Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION ' When the doomed are most eloquent in their sinking,' wrote Malcolm Lowry in one of the poems in this book,' It seems that then we are least strong to save.' The words are the man; they have the wry, archaic irony of his talk, as it still sounds in my ears; they have his stance, teetering on a rope of comic fancies between grandeur and self-pity, between exultation in his own power and agonies of self-contempt. Even the image traces an epitaph; his whole life was a slow drowning in great lonely seas of alcohol and guilt. It was all one sea, and all his own. He sank in it a thousand times and struggled back up to reveal the creatures that swam round him under his glowing reefs and in his black abysses. His talk and his writing were endless and autistic in their compulsion and terror, but they carried an eloquence such as no other artist has ever shaped for such experience. And, for all that, he never phrased an exorcism to bring him back to land. Neither Under the Volcano nor the success of it, nor all the growing company of readers and friends, could save him from his destructive element. He has dissolved into it now, leaving only the countenance, stricken yet curiously jovial, that haunts us from his writings. In the great novel, and in the stories of Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, and in those works still to be published we can see him through the naively translucent masks he put on. But here, in the poetry, we are confronted with the naked and doomed face of the man himself. Who was he? An international man, surprise mutation born in 1909 into a family of wealthy Liverpool cottonbrokers; fan of