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I watch the huge
trees tossing at the edge of the lawn
like a heaving sea
without crests, the bamboos plunge
their necks like
roped horses as yellow leaves, torn
from the whipping
branches, turn to an avalanche;
all this before the
rain scarily pours from the burst,
sodden canvas of the
sky like a hopeless sail
gusting in sheets
and hazing the hills completely
as if the whole
valley were a hull outriding the gale
and the woods were
not trees but waves of a running sea.
When light cracks
and thunder groans as if cursed
and you are safe in
a dark house deep in Santa
Cruz, with the
lights out, the current suddenly gone,
you think: "Who'll
house the shivering hawk, and the
impeccable egret and
the cloud-colored heron,
and the parrots who
panic at the false fire of dawn?"
We’ve been
reading Derek Walcott’s beautiful slim book of stalking sentences,
the lovely
White Egrets.
The Nobel-Prize winner just turned 80, and this book is, as The
New York Times says,
"...an old
man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth.”
But doing so with such controlled delight in the English language
(..my
pen’s beak, plucking up wriggling insects/like nouns and gulping
them, the nib reading/as it writes, shaking off angrily what its
beak rejects./selection is what the egrets teach/on the wide open
lawn, heads nodding as they read in purposeful silence, a language
beyond speech)
that one thinks this is what coming-of-age really means, not the
lad’s modish sentences, but this accomplished complexity, this
rhythmic assurance.
Seamus Heaney says,
“Derek Walcott has moved with gradually deepening confidence to
found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he
inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it...The Walcott line
is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise
by fine excess.”
Words far
lovelier than the images they evoke....
...slip into the
streets
Like the bookmark
in a nineteenth-century novel
In the sunlit bar the
woman draws the blinds
They look like
the slitted lids of a lioness
...a hawk on the
wrist
of a branch
And the poet
himself:
The sequence is situated in the valley of Santa Cruz.... Very
often egrets settle on the lawns, or take off. They are
beautiful in flocks or feeding by themselves. The contrast their
whiteness strikes between the lawns and the hills is naturally
beautiful. Perhaps there is something associated with this
and age—the hair turning white—or with permanence. But
really, it’s more about finding a place of serenity that is
irresistible. In the hills of Santa Cruz and the landscape around
my daughters’ houses there was some kind of a connection for me in
arriving at this serenity (physical serenity anyway) and time.
Broken mists drift across the hills. The vegetation is
brilliant—sometimes puta trees or flamboyants or immortelles....
Read:
White Egrets,
Derek Walcott
Tags:
literature
books
poetry
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