Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Walcott, Derek (Vol. 14) - William Logan

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WILLIAM LOGAN

"That sail which leans on light, / tired of islands, / a schooner beating up the Caribbean // for home" [from Sea Grapes] indicates the extraordinary acuity of vision under Derek Walcott's control, an acuity that combines terrifying precision with fresh metaphorical invention…. Sight, our frailest sense, most easily detects the decay of the world…. To confront us with the seen, Walcott reveals the numinous force of the tawdry, the cheap, the broken-down. Everywhere his metaphors pull the world to themselves: "Desolate lemons, hold / tight, in your bowl of earth, / the light to your bitter flesh". Only things seen exactly, not in the right light or the wrong light, but in a manner that quickens them, can rise from the page, neither mirage nor miracle. Walcott, ever interested in the intimate dependency of things, outlines the local gravity that arranges objects about an object:

      The chapel, as the pivot of this...

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1. Introduction
2. James Dickey
3. William Logan
4. Valerie Trueblood
5. BENJAMIN DeMOTT
6. G. E. Murray
7. John Simon
8. Edith Oliver
9. Selden Rodman
10. Robert Mazzocco
11. Copyright

1. Derek Walcott