Books: On the Volcano

COLLECTED POEMS (288pp.)—Lawrence Durrell—Dutton ($5).

To be a poet, some say, is to live more intensely than other men. By such a definition, Irish Author Lawrence Durrell must live continuously atop a volcano of awareness. His recent four-decker novel of Egypt's Alexandria—which opened with Justine and closed with Clea—is a ferment of emotions and evocations of place that already ranks with the best sensuous and sexual writing of the decade, if not of the century. In it the poet was constantly overriding the novelist and giving an intrinsically imaginative setting and characters a febrile...