Repeating Islands

KARL KIRCHWEY reviewed Derek Walcott’s new book of poems, White Egrets for the New York Times Book Review. Here are some excerpts, with the link to the full text below.

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.

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.

For the full review go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/Kirchwey-t.html