Tortoises

by D.H. Lawrence, David Ellis (Introduction), David Stubbs (Illustrator)

For many of us DH Lawrence was a schoolboy hero. Who can forget sniggering in class at the mention of ‘Women In Love’ or ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’? Lawrence was a talented if nomadic writer whose novels were passionately received, suppressed at times and generally at odds with Establishment values. This of course did not deter him. At his death in 1930 at the young age of 44 he was more often thought of as a pornographer but in the ensuing years he has come to be more rightly regarded as one of the most imaginative writers these shores have produced. As well as his novels he was also a masterful poet (he wrote over 800 of them), a travel writer as well as an author of many classic short stories. Here we publish his poetry collection ‘Tortoises’. Once again Lawrence shows his hand as a brilliant writer. Delving into situations and peeling them back to reveal the inner heart.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Animals, Fiction

52 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Sara]

i love the baby tortois poem.dital and deep in this.i love the other also but the baby the best

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began this collection wondering if I would understand the deeper meanings of Lawrence's poetry, since I have only read a few of his novels and at the time I read them, totally missed the not-so-hidden messages. The first poem here, Baby Tortoise, is so incredibly detailed that I felt I was in the garden with Lawrence, watching the little creature explore his world. We move on to examine the mathematical perfection of design in Tortoise Shell, next we meet Mother and Father Tortoise as the baby meanders around the garden in Tortoise Family Connections.

In Lui Et Elle, our attention shifts to the tortoise parents. About Mother, Lawrence says:
She is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had
driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at
random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.
She likes to eat.

And Father Tortoise is described as:
Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination,
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him,
serpents' long obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.

The final two poems of the collection, Tortoise Gallantry and Tortoise Shout, are stunning glimpses behind the curtain surrounding private connections made in the garden. And not just mating tortoises: Lawrence ponders
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling
across the deeps, calling, calling for the
complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being
answered, having found.


I think this collection is lovely, and I am impressed with the ideas expressed in my first sample of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. I will be looking for more, and I will also re-visit his novels.

[Fin · Rating 3 out of 5]

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your
little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-
pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Whither away, small bird?

Starts off cutesy nature fluff, but by the end of the poem sequence it's somehow mutated into a feverish and misanthropic study of tortoise-sex-as-eternal-crucifixion.. so typical Lawrence I guess. Can see what Deleuze & Guattari are on about now.

The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single
inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.

(this is about a tortoise orgasm)

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this tiny little chapbook on my Kindle for ages; I think I first got it back when I was doing my PhD, and flipping through various nature writing collections. It is as appealingly weird as I remember. Basically, it does what it says on the tin. Tortoises contains six (fairly long) poems about, you guessed it, tortoises. Unless he's just bullshitting, Lawrence had a family of them living in his garden, and he seems thoroughly fascinated by them. He especially seems fascinated with tortoise sex, and let's be honest this is about what you'd expect from him. The female tortoise is very large, the male is very small, and it's all as awkward as you think and yet strangely entertaining, which is probably why he was watching them in the first place.

Not that I'm one to talk. If tortoises were fucking in my garden I'd probably watch them too, though I don't know that I'd go so far as to put the experience into verse.

[Bernardo Magalhães · Rating 5 out of 5]

o melhor dos melhores