Great Derek Walcott links!
My favorite short poems from Walcott
Walcott has demonstrated such an extensive range of literary expressiveness. His works go from the sacred to satirical as you will see from excerpts on my pages.
He has been published worldwide and is on the Advisory board for the Caribbean Writer which features his poems and the works of others.
"One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it...The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by a fine excess. It can be incantatory and self-entrancing, as in the early "Sea-Chantey" and the later "Season of Phantasmal Peace." It can be athletic and demotic as in "Tales of the Islands" or "The Spoiler's Return." It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words...This is a triumphant book."
"By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature."
"Derek Walcott's virtues as a poet are extraordinary...He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond it own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts."
"One of Walcott's poems Another Life is a narrative poem of over four thousand lines that J.D. McClatchy, writing in The New Republic, praised as "one of the best long autobiographical poems in English, with the narrative sweep, the lavish layering of details, and the mythic resonance of a certain classic." Collected Poems recieved the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry."
Great Derek Walcott links!
My favorite short poems from Walcott
Note: My poetry pages have been designed with consideration for text browsers.
The rain season comes with its load.
The half-year has travelled far. Its back hurts.
It drizzles wearily.
It is twenty years since,
now clear, now indistinct,
In that hair I could walk through the wheatfields of Russia,
you are Anna of the wheatfield and the weir,
gone from the marsh edge,
from the drizzled shallows
puckering with gooseflesh,
Anna of the first green poems that startingly hardened.
of the mellowing breasts now,
Anna of the lurching, long flamingoes
of the harsh salt lingering in the thimble
of the bather's smile,
Anna of the darkened house, among the reeking shell cases,
lifting my hand and swearing us to her breast,
unbearably clear-eyed.
You are all Annas, enduring all goodbyes,
within the cynical station of your body,
Christie, Karenina, big-boned and passive,
that I found life within some novel's leaves
more real than you, already chosen
as his doomed heroine. You knew, you knew.
Who were you, then?
The golden partisan of my young Revolution,
my braided, practical, seasoned commissar,
your back, bent at its tasks, in the blue kitchen,
or hanging flags of laundry, feeding the farm's chicken,
against a fantasy of birches,
poplars, or whatever.
As if a pen's eye could catch that virginal litheness,
as if shade and sunlight leoparding the blank page
could be so literal,
foreign as snow,
far away as first love,
my Akhmatova!
Twenty years later, in the odour of burnt shells,
you can remind me of "A Visit to the Pasternaks,"
so that you are suddenly the word "wheat,"
falling on the ear, against the frozen silence of a weir,
again you are bending
over a cabbage garden, tending
a snowdrift of rabbits,
or pulling down the clouds from the thrumming clotheslines.
If dreams are signs,
then something died this minute,
its breath blown from a different life,
from a dream of snow, from paper
to white paper flying, gulls and herons
following this plough. And now,
you are suddenly old, white-haired,
like the herons, the turned page. Anna, I wake
to the knowledge that things sunder
from themselves, like peeling bark,
to the emptiness
of a bright silence shining after thunder.
"Any island would drive you crazy,"
I knew you'd grow tired
of all that iconography of the sea
like the young wind, a bride
riffling daylong the oceans catalogue
of shells and algae
everything, this flock
of white, novitiate herons
I saw in the grass of a grey parish church,
like nurses, or young nuns after the communion,
their sharp eyes sought me out
as yours once, only.
And you were heron-like,
a water-haunter,
you grew bored with your island,
till, finally, you took off,
without a cry,
a novice in your nurse's uniform,
years later I imagined you
walking through trees to some grey hospital,
serene communicant
but never "lonely,"
like the wind, never to be married,
your faith like folded lined, a nun's, a nurse's,
why should you read this now?
No woman should read verses
twenty years late. You go about your calling, candle-like,
carrying yourself down a dark aisle
of wounded, married to the sick,
knowing one husband, pain,
only with the heron-flock, the rain,
the stone church, I remembered...
Besides, the slender, virginal New Year's
just married, like a birch
to a few crystal tears,
and like a birch bent at the register
who cannot, for a light's flash, change her name,
she still writes '65 for '66;
so, watching the tacit
ministering herons, each at its
work among the dead, the stone church, the stones,
I made this in your honour, when
vows and affections failing
your soul leapt like a heron sailing
from the salt, island grass
into another heaven.
Anna replies:
I am simple,
I was simpler then.
It was simplicity
which seemed so sensual.
What could I understand,
the world, the light? The light
in the mud-stained sea-wash,
the light in a gull's creak
letting the night in?
They were simple to me,
I was not within them as simply
as I was within you.
It was your selflessness
which loved me as the world,
I was a child, as much
as you, but you brought the tears
of too many contradictions,
I became a metaphor, but
believe me I was as unsubtle as salt.
And I answer, Anna,
twenty years after,
a man lives half of life,
the second half is memory,
the first half, hesitation
for what should have happened
but could not, or
what happened with others
when it should not.
A gleam. Her burning grip. The brass shell cases,
oxidized, the brass reeking of cordite,
forty-one years after the Great War. The gleam
of brass reburnished in the allamanda,
through the barbed wire of bougainvillea thorns
beyond the window, on the sun-chevroned porch
I watched the far cannon smoke of cloud
above the Morne, wounded, struck dumb,
as she drew my hand firmly to the firstness
of the crisp, fragile cloth across her breast,
in a locked silence, she the nurse,
I the maimed soldier. There have been
other silences, none as deep. There has since
been possession, none as sure.
If you want to find out the events leading up to the story told at this time, get the book and start reading from Chapter One in Another Life and right past this part, to the ending in Chapter 23.