HEAR US O LORD FROM HEAVEN THY DWELLING PLACE

Lowry, Cambridge graduate and seaman, published in 1947 the brilliant, complex, critically acclaimed the . Now comes the posthumous collection of his short stories, containing, quite probably, some of the finest writing of our times. In the first long story of a sea voyage. Lowry's particular genius for conveying the multi-leveled feel of life, time, mind, is at its most polished and intense, cross-currented with myths, musical themes, scenery, and shot with the incredible, magnificent laughter of a mind at grips with itself. It is told in such succinct, diary form (interspersed with longer reflections) that at the end, with the ship wallowing in a desperate storm and the notations tapping out like an SOS, the story becomes an almost physically-felt account of Life's voyage, Everyman's ship...The middle stories are, apparently, earlier experiments in the medium, with the Henry James' handling of complex consciousness, dealing with writers abroad, other Lowry-selves, displaced and seeking minds, set among the ruins of Pompeii, Rome and personal pasts. Odd and somehow fresh... Then, perhaps earlier, certainly more personal, come accounts of his honeymoon and life in British Columbia, in which the foregoing themes are recognizable in their lyric sources. The prose varies, but there is an incredible shine and flexibility to all of it, as if an extraordinarily sensitive mind had been imprinted on the paper. Remarkable to read, and as a reverse record of the development of a mind and a writer, unique. One man's-everyman's- life is here.