In this new selection from the poetry of Lawrence Durrell (the first for thirty years), Peter Porter has drawn on the full range of the published work, fromA Private Country (1943) toVega (1973), and has provided a long overdue revaluation of Durrell's poetic career. In his detailed and generous introduction, Porter makes the case forA Private Country as one of the most accomplished debut collections of the twentieth century, and traces Durrell's preoccupations and poetic personality within the wider scene. The selection of poems makes its own strong case for the continuing power and originality of this attractive, metropolitan and wholly individual body of work.

Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first literary work,The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1958. His first collection of poems,A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books:Prospero's Cell,Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, andBitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece,The Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet andThe Avignon Quintet he wrote the two-deckerTunc andNunquam. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps.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 Sommières in 1990.