Derek Walcott 1930-2017
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"Poetry, is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow", claimed Walcott in his Nobel speech. Here, the poet of the Caribbean, illustrates this apparent ease of writing and shows us how fragmented memory is central to his poetry. (for Garth St Omer) Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned only, when her looms fade, drilled in our skulls, the doom- surge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage under the coconuts' salt-rusted swords, these rotted leathery sea-grape leaves, the seacrabs' brittle helmets, and this barbecue of branches, like the ribs of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand; only this fish-gut reeking beach whose frigate stuck like buzzards overhead whose spindly, sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows because your clothes, your posture seem a tourist's. They swarm like flies round your heart's sore. Suffer them to come, entering their needle's eye knowing whether they live or die, what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, all this you knew, but never guessed you'd come to know there are homecomings without home. You give them nothing. Their curses melt in air. The black cliffs scowl, the ocean sucks its teeth, like that long dugout canoe like a small petal fallen in a cup, reflecting nothing but its image, you sway, reflecting nothing. The freighter's silvery ghost is gone, the children gone. Dazed by the sun you trudge back to the village past the white, salty esplanade under whose palms, dead fishermen move their draughts in shade, crossing, eating their islands, and one, with a politician's ignorant, sweet smile, nods as if all fate swayed in his lifted hand. |
Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott dies aged 87 in St Lucia
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Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott has died aged 87 at his home in the Caribbean island of St Lucia after a long illness, local media reports say.
He was regarded by critics as one of the greatest Caribbean poets.
The writer's collections include In A Green Night: Poems 1948 - 1960 and his epic work, Omeros, which draws on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2011.
His winning collection for the TS Eliot Prize, White Egrets, was called "a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet" by the judges.
The Nobel Committee, announcing his prize, said: "His poetry acquires at one and the same time singular lustre and great force... Walcott's style is melodious and sensitive."
The poet won many other prizes, including a MacArthur Foundation award - the so-called "genius grant".
Walcott said at the time: "It's nice to get it, because it gives you four or five years of a great deal of security - the tough thing is when it's finished!
"It has a very bad connotation, this idea of a 'genius' - I'm not denying the fact that I'm prodigious, I'm not denying the fact that I wrote well... to me it's a gift. I feel blessed that I was gifted."
Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1992, he said he had written as far back as he could remember, and recalled his mother, a schoolteacher, reciting Shakespeare at home.
His father, who died while he was still an infant, had also written poetry, he said.
"I heard that kind of sound at home from when I was very young," he said. "I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry."
Born in 1930, he studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, before moving to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.
He published his first collection, 25 Poems, at the age of 18. He was also an accomplished painter and playwright.
The Cultural Development Foundation of St Lucia has paid tribute to Walcott, saying in a statement: "The world has lost one of its noted literary icons.
"Our sympathies extend to St Lucia as a nation, who without doubt are proud and honoured to call him a true son of St Lucia.
"He was very vocal about the island's culture and heritage, and its preservation, and his love for St Lucia and the Caribbean was evident in his numerous mentions of 'home' in his work."
Speaking about the shock of returning home to St Lucia, Walcott said: "You had to balance off the beauty of the place with some of the poverty around you."
The Poetry Society described his death as "terrible news" and encouraged others to read his poetry in memoriam.
Walcott was also embroiled in controversy over his candidacy for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2009.
He pulled out of the race after academics at the university received dozens of anonymous letters linking him to an allegation of sexual harassment in 1982.
The eventual winner - the first woman to hold the prestigious position - was then forced to resign after just days in office, when it emerged she had briefed journalists on the allegations.
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