I seek/ As climate seeks its style to write/ Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight/ Cold as the curled wave, ordinary/ As a tumbler of island water (PDW 54)
In the first poem in his 1984 volume Midsummer, Derek Walcott describes the jet’s approach as he returns to his adopted homeland of Trinidad:
The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud –
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
not the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,
but pages in a damp culture that come apart.
So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island . . . (PDW 331, ll. 1-7)
That reading of the landscape of his home as a kind of text, indeed as a poem in which, “The lowering window resounds / over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas” (ll. 19-20) is apt given that much of his work is imbued with the light, the sea, and the people of the Caribbean. READ MORE
A Far Cry From Africa