Derek Walcott, Man of Many Voices

By KARL KIRCHWEY

Published: April 22, 2010

More than almost any other contemporary poet, Derek Walcott might seem to be fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s program for poetry. He has distinguished himself in all of what Eliot described as the “three voices of poetry”: the lyric, the narrative or epic, and the dramatic. Since at least his 1984 book “Midsummer,” Walcott has been publishing what might be described as concatenated lyrics, individual poems numbered consecutively and intended to form a conceptual whole. His long 1990 poem “Omeros” would be called canonical were that word not so problematic these days. And, like Eliot, Walcott is also a playwright. Through his long connection with the Trinidad Theater Workshop, he has amassed an impressive body of dramatic works, both in prose and in that tricky form called verse drama.

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Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

Derek Walcott

WHITE EGRETS

Poems

By Derek Walcott

86 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

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But the kinship with Eliot, for Walcott, extends beyond genre. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot opined that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Walcott has deliberately avoided the confessional path pioneered by his early friend and supporter Robert Lowell, choosing instead a post-Romantic voice, closely allied with landscape, in which the particulars of a life are incidental to a larger poetic vision, one in which the self is not the overt subject.

All the more striking, then, is Walcott’s new book, “White Egrets” — for it is both visionary, in the best sense of that word, and intensely personal, even autobiographical. It is an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth; and it is a book of stoic reckoning. That reckoning takes place on several levels: corporeal (coping with “the quiet ravages of diabetes”) and also social (the deaths of old friends and fellow poets; the commercial overdevelopment of Walcott’s native St. Lucia, described as “a slavery without chains, with no blood spilt”). This is a book of turning away from all that is modish in literature, from “the deliberate delight in incoherence, the whiff of chaos / off the first page of some new book” and toward his fit audience, however few, toward “You, my dearest friend, Reader.”

These poems do achieve an extraordinary intimacy of tone, but they also conjure, for that reader, a full spectrum of responses to mortality, from calm (“I reflect quietly on how soon I will be going”) through self-mocking (“What? You’re going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”) to something darker (“the pitch of para­lysed horror / that his prime is past”). And it is the calm that impresses most, after the disturbances of passion, as Walcott speaks of “that peace / beyond desires and beyond regrets / at which I may arrive eventually.”

“White Egrets” is also a reckoning with a lifetime’s artistic practice, a measuring of the self against immortals: Wyatt, Surrey and Clare among poets, and among artists (for Walcott is also an accomplished painter, though severe in his judgment of himself) Mantegna, Crivelli and Sarto, Hals, Rubens and Rembrandt.

Those names, in fact, are a reminder that Walcott has always challenged, by complicating, the attempt to dismiss Euro­centric culture and traditional poetic form as just the claptrap and legacy of imperialism. In this book he continues to tell the truth slant, frequently in sonnetlike poems that are never quite 14 lines long, in rhymes so casual as to appear, sometimes, clumsily improvisational and at others brilliantly opportunistic. One rhyme pair, “casuarinas” (referring to the cassowary tree) and “marinas,” appeared originally in a haunting paean to the poet’s ability to harmonize with nature in Walcott’s 1997 book “The Bounty,” and here recurs in a meditation on mortality that ends: “fear melts / before daylight’s beauty, despite all that coughing.”

On the one hand, Walcott writes that Europe “is poetry’s weather, this is its true home.” But on the other, he refers to Joseph Conrad as “that bastard” for his depiction of the “emptiness” of places like St. Lucia, and concludes proudly, “This verse / is part of the emptiness, as is the valley of Santa Cruz, / a genuine benediction as his is a genuine curse.” To be sure, Walcott’s love for his island is mediated through his knowledge of the larger world beyond its shores; he asserts that “This small place produces / nothing but beauty.”

And yet he is never in any doubt that his poetry depends absolutely on the inspiration provided by this one geographical spot among all others. Referring to the Irish poet, Walcott writes, “I’m content as Kavanagh with his few acres; / for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea’s lace,” and again, in deep humility, “my love of the island has never diminished / but will burn steadily when I am gone.” These poems are often close to prayer. Allegiance to, and gratitude for, the world’s beauty are both the least and the greatest tribute a writer must pay, in Walcott’s view. For a poet of his seniority to write “The perpetual ideal is astonishment” is a wonder, like George Herbert’s desire, after his spirit’s tempest, to “once more smell the dew and rain, / And relish versing.”

For all this new book’s awareness of one geographical location, its true achievement lies in what we might call a pelagic poetic consciousness. Walcott is, in some way, “homelessly at home,” as Richard Wilbur once said. The mind of these poems exists simultaneously in St. Lucia and in Sicily (after all, St. Lucy — the patron saint of light or vision — came from the Italian city of Syracuse); in a harbor that is at once Rodney Bay, Venice and Stockholm; under a mountain that is both the Petit Piton and the Matterhorn. This is the simultaneous vision that allowed Walcott’s epic “Omeros” to range so effortlessly across the Atlantic Ocean and to exist in the Old World and the New, though in this late work the tide pulls strongly eastward: “if the soul ever rests, / its next beach will be Dakar.” Pronouns in this book — “you” or “she,” for instance — are haunted and polyvalent, referring to a particular past erotic partner and to the muse of poetry herself; but the predictability of this equivalence is dignified by time and loss.

What of the white egrets of the book’s title? They are “abrupt angels,” “the bleached regrets / of an old man’s memoirs,” and “torn poems.” They are ghost-birds, emblems of self-devouring introspection and resolute survival, of accepting that “At least the grief I felt was my own making.” And for this poet who has, by a lifelong act of imagination, contemplated so many opposites assumed to be irreconcilable, they are perhaps a symbol of unity at last, allowing him to end with an ordinary beatitude:

                                                Happier
than any man now is the one who sits drinking
wine with his lifelong companion under the winking
stars and the steady arc lamp at the end of the pier.

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Karl Kirchwey teaches at Bryn Mawr College. His sixth book of poems, “Mount Lebanon,” and his translation of Paul Verlaine’s first book, “Poems Under Saturn,” are both forthcoming in the spring of 2011.

Performance Time: 15:00
Venue: Lakeside Theatre

 

The University of Essex is proud to present Visiting Professor of Poetry Derek Walcott. 

In the first visit of his two-year appointment to the post, the Nobel prize-winning Caribbean poet will be in conversation with Professor Marina Warner and Dr Maria Cristina Fumagalli of the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies. This afternoon, Derek Walcott will be looking back at more than sixty years of writing, painting, theatre directing and teaching, as well as reading from his latest volume of poetry, White Egrets.

"In these exquisitely poised and potent poems, language stands as the thinnest possible lens between the poet and the world he describes..."

The Guardian on White Egrets

Tickets:
Admission Free. Please reserve in advance.

Booking information:

Ticket Hotline:	01206 573948
Book Online:	Online booking is currently being updated.
In person:	Lakeside Theatre, Square 5 Monday – Friday 8.30 – 4, Saturday 10 – 2 Mercury Theatre, Colchetser, England Mon – Saturday 10- 8