Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry (1909--1957) was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school. He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers. Earle Birney (1904-1995) was a distinguished Canadian poet novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for his poetry.

• Contents Introduction 7 THE ROAR OF THE SEA AND THE DARKNESS No Kraken shall be found till sought by name 11 Look out! The bloody bosun! 12 Byzantium 13Old freighter in an old port 14 Iron cities 15 The flowering past 16 The ship is turning homeward 17 The lighthouse invites the storm 18 Tashtego believed Red 19 Vigil Forget 20 The days like smitten cymbals of brass 21 THUNDER BEYOND POPOCATEPETL Thunder beyond Popocatepetl 22For Under the Volcano 23 Xochitepec 25The Volcano is Dark 26Grim vinegarroon 27In the Oaxaca Jail 28For the love of dying 29Death of a Oaxaqueñan 30In a Mexican church 31Delirium in Vera Cruz 32Sunrise 33THE CANTINAS Prayer for drunks 34Thirty-five mescals in Cuautla 35Eye-opener 36No company but fear 37 No time to stop and think 38Comfort 38 Without the nighted wyvern 39The drunkards 40At the bar 40Sestina in a Cantina 41VENUS Venus 45 Fragment 46 A New Ship 47 A poem of God's mercy 47 A quarrel 49 No still path 50 Nocturne 51 Saint Malcolm among the birds 52Happiness 53Be patient for the wolf 54 THE COMEDIAN The Comedian 56Men with coats thrashing 57Thoughts while drowning 58 Queer poem 59Poem 59Midtown pyromaniac 60Injured stones 61Epitaph 62SONGS FROM THE BEACH : ERIDANUSKingfishers in British Columbia 63 Christ walks in this infernal district too 64 Whirlpool 65Hostage 65 The glaucous-winged gull 66 The ship sails on: for Nordahl Grieg 67The wounded bat 68The past 69The pilgrim 70The wild cherry 71THE LANGUAGE OF MAN'S WOERilke and Yeats 72Thoughts to be erased from my destiny 73Joseph Conrad 74Trinity 74The doomed in their sinking 75Eels 76The plagiarist 76He liked the dead 77After publication of Under the Volcano78The search 78Strange type 79

"These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle—with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle’s fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction—but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."—William T. Vollmann