I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, in the Caribbean. It’s Derek Walcott’s childhood home in Castries, St Lucia. I had some Walcott with me; I like to read poets in their own territory. I’ve read Pablo Neruda in Chile, Robert Lowell in Boston, Dylan Thomas on the Gower Peninsular and, to give a rather less well-known example, Gillian Allnutt in Northumbria. In Walcott’s case, I wanted the experience of reading lines like this, in situ:
The cool green lawn, the quiet trees, the forest
on the hill there, then, the white gasp of an egret sent
sailing into the frame then teetering to rest
with its gawky stride, erect, an egret-emblem!
I didn’t manage to lift my head from the page and see a white egret, but I did see them, up-close and beautiful.
Holiday over, I came home to snow and rain in South London. Still reading Walcott, to prolong the idea of the holiday a little, I came across the poem ‘Storm Figure’ from ‘The Arkansas Testament’. He’s a poet who tells you where he is and when; now, this morning, last night, yesterday. This poem has him in and around his beach house:
‘Barefoot on the cold grass outside the beach house,
you see fresh channels furrowing the beach’s dreck….
breakers that chuff; long, leaden swells of pewter,
the pier piles grumbling, mosses gripped by crabs.’
But Walcott’s mind is half elsewhere, in another place, another book, a different century:
‘The nineteenth century, like a hurricane lamp,
haloed, last night, the boards of a kitchen table.
With the lamp poles down, it’s wick smoke pined and flamed,
singeing the mind’s ceiling like a Hardy novel.
……The wrong time. The wrong ground. The Wessex coast
is in another century….
So I was sitting in Brixton, reading Derek Walcott in St Lucia thinking about Thomas Hardy in Dorset, which felt like a good thing to be doing. We need to be located, but we also need literature to take us away. We don’t always want to be exactly where we are, or rather, we want to be here and elsewhere, simultaneously. We might want to be someone else for a while, or just not quite ourselves.
By chance, the latest issue of Poetry Nation Review arrived last week, and I found this by Devin Johnston, from ‘Wild Thought: Some notes on Poetry’:
‘the lyric poem… momentarily displaces the story that I am telling and retelling myself. Each day, through the day, we tell the story again, in even the faintest whispers of consciousness, with slight variations to accommodate changes in our lives; each night, we unravel the story in dreams. Yet the poem, even freshly composed, carries the feeling that it precedes such narratives, or stands apart from them. However much the poem may be mine, it ‘puts individuality at risk’. The trail that I have been following through a wood opens into a field and disperses in the grass.’
As readers, the trail is entirely in our hands. We can close the book and it no longer exists. Or it waits for us, a permanent possibility, always available. In the same issue Lesley Harrison quotes Francis Spufford from ‘I May Be Some Time’. He describes the allure of sitting somewhere warm – ‘a dark evening of a temperate winter and the radiators are on’, reading about somewhere that is utterly elsewhere. ‘One is there in imagination as one reads, but with the possibility of instant withdrawal.’
Back to Walcott’s poem. These are the last two stanzas:
‘Now sunshine with its mullioned mackerel dances
over lamp and novel by the double bed,
rippling the oval where her drowned face glances
till the circle of one century has settled.
On drying scarps, with loops of tidal grass,
her shadow fades into the clouding sand;
surf lifts its hem to let a low seagull pass
arrowing in silence, which is the soul’s sound.’
the word-road home 