In the later poems of Derek Walcott, there is a recurring clarity that resists embellishment. White Egrets often gives the impression of a painter’s gaze: attentive to the ordinary without condescension, a stillness that draws its texture from close looking. It recalls the post-impressionists, Bonnard especially, in the almost tactile precision of detail:
Irises stipple the hot square in passing showers,
shadows pause in their casework, ornate balconies rust,
the sunlight of olive oil slowly spread in saucers
and loves that are hard to break have a screw crust.
Esperanza, cherished Esperanza!
Your lashes like black moths, like twigs your frail wrists,
your small, cynical mouth with its turned-down answer,
when it laughs, is like a soft stanza
That line—“the sunlight of olive oil slowly spread in saucers”—could hang in a gallery. Walcott is, of course, also a painter. The visual precision here doesn’t overwhelm; it steadies. These are poems stripped of rhetoric, speaking without affectation. Part of the pleasure of reading White Egrets is this surface ease, the temptation to drift over the top of things, until something small insists on a return, a rereading.
Coming to Walcott after Mayröcker or Celan, the effect is cleansing. But lucidity should not be mistaken for simplicity. What persists is a kind of weathered inwardness; age, yes, but also an intimacy with his own refusals, his repetitions, the honesty of fatigue:
If I fall into a grizzled stillness
sometimes, over the red-chequered tablecloth
outdoors of the Sweet Life Café, when the noise
of Sunday traffic in the Village is soft as a moth
working in storage, it is because of age
which I rarely admit to, or, honestly think of.
I have kept the same furies, though my domestic rage
is illogical, diabetic, with no lessening of love
though my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page.
The poems never insist. They inhabit contradictions, melancholy, rage, gentleness, without trying to resolve them. The mood is elegiac but never resigned, and the voice, though self-aware, resists the confessional register:
in March, you blaze in her praise like a sea-almond
the crab scrawls your letters then hides them,
certain that she would never understand.
How boring the love of others is, isn’t it, Reader?
This page, touched by the sun’s declining arc,
sighs with the same whinge, the Sonnets and Petrarch.
White Egrets is best read whole. The coherence comes not from narrative or theme, but from a slow, deliberate accumulation. It is not that the poems explain the self: they do something rarer.
Thank you for these extracts, which are lovely. I’ve not read Walcott (though my Offspring have) and if I do I will defiinitely go for the individual collections – I’m increasingly finding that collected volumes don’t work for many poets I love.
For those poets I read often I like to get the collected volume to read chronologically, but more often than not, I end up collecting the original collections as these, I imagine, best reflect the poet’s placing and selection.
Yes, it’s that latter element particularly – I came across this with Larkin, whose collected works are completely chronological and that doesn’t relate at all to his careful choice of order for his individual volumes. Conversely, my collected Anne Sexton is simply divided into the original collections, which offends me less! 😀