Derek Walcott: The Written World

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)

Introduction  

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