Ms. Sackville-West (you may remember) had a bit of a run-in with the poetry committee of the Society of Authors in March, 1946, in the midst of trying to decide who would read at an upcoming poetry recital for the Queen. If she held any ill-will towards Reed she does not show it in her review of A Map of Verona for The Observer on May 5th ("Seething Brain," p. 3), little more than a week before the recital.
Indeed, she reports being 'much taken with the poem called "Lives," which seemed to express so admirably Mr. Reed's sense of the elusiveness as well as the continuity of life':
In addition to Reed's A Map of Verona: Poems (Cape) and Durrell's Cities Plains and People (Faber), Sackville-West also reviews (at length): Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances (Dent); Edwin Muir's The Voyage and Other Poems (Faber); Four Quartets Rehearsed by Raymond Preston (Sheed and Ward); Pushkin's Poems, translated by Walter Morison (Allen and Unwin); Modern Czech Poetry translated by Ewald Osers and J.K. Montgomery (Allen and Unwin); and Joseph Braddock's Swanhild (Chaterson).
As for Vita and Henry, well... the poetry committee didn't pick him, either.
