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The Red Limbo Lingo: a poetry notebook
Originally published in a limited edition, this book is not difficult to come by, but it has grown signifigantly in cost over the years (I'd be very interested to know what the original publisher's list was in 1971 - must find that out). A total of six hundred were published each in Britain and the United States respectively, of these twelve hundred one hundred were signed for each country. A signed copy is obviously going to set you back further still. While it appears that all of the actual poems appear in the Collected Poems of 1980, for my money, it's still worth picking up the individual volume too. Bound in red cloth with an acetate jacket, the book was further enhanced by a black slipcase. |
A
work which has given Durrell odd and occasional representative
appearances in anthologies favoured by those who hold fast to
a belief in vampires as something more toothy than a metaphor,
The Red Limbo Lingo is a work of haunting beauty and complexity.
A combination of poetry and notes surrounding the poems, it examines
themes of blood and metaphor, of love and regret, of life and
death, in an astonishing variety of shades of emotion and meaning.
Haunting poems like 'Pistol Weather' and 'Lake Music' rub shoulders
with a personal favourite, 'The Reckoning'. Durrell was always
challenging when it came to matters of life and love and space
and time, and this remains true in this 'slim volume of verse'.