Rather like the generalized implication that there is a whole unified scene going for all of us in the New World, in the geographical, historical and political concept of José Martí's nuestra américa, anything anyone says about the poetry of Derek Walcott can be argued as true. His is a new voice redolent with traceries of the elitist elegance of the Old World. His poetry, or at least much of it, is also a radical truth-saying in “other words,” in our time, an old report brought forward with sensitive alterations from “another country” to nuestra américa. And further, it is the Anglophone Caribbean bringing the salt of her history and received language to bear on the comparatively recent seasoning of our hemisphere's newness.

But more than anything else, it is Walcott's territorial and ontological promise in “Islands,” from In a Green Night, that makes me know where I am in relation to and what I am to expect from his contribution to nuestra américa.

                                                            I seek
As climate seeks its style, to write
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
As a tumbler of island water. …

But first, how about that “island”? How about those islands which are the centrality of our Caribbean input into the hemisphere? Walcott's timely warning in that direction is one of the finest in Caribbean poetry that I know and one seldom ever reckoned with when his work is written about in the United States and Britain. His warning also comes from “islands,” and I personally take it seriously; for after all, deep down we all do know that “islands can only exist / If we have loved in them.” That is to say, in effect, that Walcott is our greatest living love poet and that his profoundly important contribution to nuestra américa is his poetry of island love, archipelago love, sea love, ocean love and his loving recollection of the formation of nuestra américa. It is from that view of volume after volume of his crystalline poems that I see Walcott's significance and impact in our problematical New World.

If In a Green Night announces his territorial and historical perspective of love, then the Selected Poems further enhances it and deepens his announcement into a personal declaration. The Castaway is another collection that carries forward the statement of New World caring in those two earlier books. Here Walcott reminds us that Crusoe is adrift on Caribbean islands, cut off from the outside world, and consequently must learn to expect little of it. Indeed, “Crusoe's Journal,” one of the memorable poems in The Castaway, has for its epigraph a quotation from Robinson Crusoe which ends with Abraham's words to Dives: “Between me and thee is a great gulf fixed.” In a sense The Castaway heralded Walcott's next book, The Gulf. And there is a line in “Miramar” which more than hints that “There is nowhere to go.” Yet at the same time, Walcott's commitment to hope, as the first step toward gaining the necessary courage to approach and break through the inherited gloom of Caribbean underdevelopment and pessimism, urges him to complete the line as follows: “There is nowhere to go. You'd better go.”

In 1969, when I read The Gulf in the Jonathan Cape edition, I mistook the central emphasis of the poems as suggesting that the loneliness of islands, their abject isolation, causes all islanders (hence all people so isolated) to strive inordinately for a protective identity, and especially for a quick, hard-edged, materialistic one at that. And, of course, there was more than enough textual evidence to endorse the mistake of that reading. Rereading The Gulf later on in 1975 and again in 1981 for this article, I discovered that there was just as much corroborative evidence to suggest that the metaphorical loneliness of islands (together with their “lack of identity” in the outside world's false reckoning) could also be interpreted as the inaccessible quality of love as it becomes enisled. In other words, my later readings yielded Walcott's poetic theory of isolation and namelessness as a paradigm of the death of love.

And so, even in the most literal, surface reading of Another Life, Walcott's autobiographical long poem of over 4,000 lines, his specific recollections of love, misconstrued and reappraised, connect fairly readily.

                                                            Maman,
only on Sundays was the Singer silent,
then,
tobacco smelt stronger, was more masculine.
Sundays
the parlour smelt of uncles,
the lamppoles rang,
the drizzle shivered its maracas,
like mandolins the tightening wires of rain,
then
from striped picnic buses, jour marron,
gold bangles tinkled like good-morning in Guinea
and a whore's laughter opened like sliced fruit.

Here again, the poet speaks lovingly to his mother, his very own St. Lucian “Maman,” but also to mine in Jamaica and to the mother of us all, everywhere throughout the Area, the ever-present Caribbean Sea, the old, loving shelter.

Old house, old woman, old room
old planes, old buckling membranes of the womb,
translucent walls,
breathe through your timbers; gasp
arthritic, curling beams,
cough in old air
shining with motes, stair
polished and repolished by the hands of strangers,
die with defiance flecking your grey eyes,
motes of a sunlit air,
your timbers humming with constellations of carcinoma,
your bed frames glowing with radium,
cold iron dilating the fever of your body,
while the galvanised iron snaps in spasms of pain,
but a house gives no outcry,
it bears the depth of forest, of ocean and mother.
Each consuming the other
with memory and unuse.

And similarly in the objects of the old house, the ones handled by Maman, the same ones recollected by the poet, in pained tranquillity, those that help frame the anguished questions:

… when did the tightened scream
of that bedspring finally snap,
when did that unsilvering mirror finally
surrender her vanity,
and, in turn, these objects assess us,
that yellow paper flower with the eyes of a cat,
that stain, familiar as warts or some birthmark,
as the badge of some loved defect. …

Another Life, apart from being a “self-inquiry and cultural assessment in the context of a Caribbean life” and the dismantling and redefining of a former colonial poet's “cultural apparatus of … imperialist tutelage,” as George Lamming, the distinguished Barbadian novelist and poet, correctly put it, is also an affecting heroic narrative of historical and contemporary defects lovingly owned up to and accepted, in spite of their harrowing memories, lingering scars and half-healed wounds. Walcott's recall of the inconsolable burden of innocence and experience of a people breaking out of the aching silence of colonial defects, cracking the solitude of underdevelopment and neo-colonialism, is the most truly remarkable personal cri de coeur so far published by any Caribbean writer I know.

When I think of the stinging truth of the following lines, I'm acutely aware of how deep Walcott has dredged our psychic loss and caused our current pain to surface—and especially so in the tellingly chosen poetic diction and metaphorical usage of his imaginative report.

Skin wrinkles like paint,
the forearm of a balustrade freckles,
crows' feet radiate
from the shut eyes of windows,
and the door, mouth clamped, reveals nothing,
for there is no secret,
there is no other secret
but a pain so alive that
to touch every ledge of that house edges a scream
from the burning wires, the nerves
with their constellation of cancer,
the beams with their star-seed of lice,
pain shrinking every room,
pain shining in every womb,
while the blind, dumb
termites, with jaws of the crabcells consume,
in silent thunder,
to the last of all Sundays,
consume.

And he continues by daring us to touch those closed windows, the ledge of that house, the burning wires, those nerves, to touch the terror of death in life, if only to prove our capacity for loving a world we can't hope to move or embrace with our love.

Finger each object, lift it
from its place, and it screams again
to be put down
in its ring of dust, like the marriage finger
frantic without its ring;
I can no more move you from your true alignment,
mother, than we can move objects in paintings.

Equally haunting reflections on love (ones which when lifted off the page, up to memory and recall, seem to scream to be put back instantly), together with their concomitant sense of loss and actuality of present pain, also appear in many of the poems in Walcott's latest book, Sea Grapes. Take this one on love turned round and badly used as a suction-trap for the unsuspecting: in part five of “Sainte Lucie,” “For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, Saint Lucia,” the poet's ironic lunge at the power of the ever-loving church in underdevelopment comes first, I suspect, from his personal detestation of the betrayal of the poor and, secondly, from his quiet, political appraisal of that betrayal. In fact, the dream-laden altarpiece sucks everything toward it, rather like a reverential art work that gobbles the faith of worshipers and distantly trusting spectators; and so the Valley Church is simply another institutional hungry maw that swallows whole the labor of the people, the goodness of the land, the dreams of the hopeful.

                                        This is a cursed valley,
ask the broken mules, the swollen children,
ask the dried women, their gap-toothed men,
ask the parish priest, who, in the altarpiece,
carries a replica of the church,
ask the two who could be Eve and Adam dancing.

Of course, there's no sentimental regret here concerning the death of our own Edenic Caribbean or indeed our own Edenic New World. That is not Walcott's point at all. What I believe he truly regrets is the death of harmony, the death of love. And Walcott's is a telling, quiet regret. It matches the tone and quality of the many glimpses of love he evokes and makes poems out of in Sea Grapes. Both his regret and the love that it laments are understated and true, for Walcott well knows that

Things do not explode,
they fail, they fade,
as sunlight fades from the flesh,
as the foam drains quick in the sand,
even love's lightning flash
has no thunderous end,
it dies with the sound
of flowers fading like the flesh. …

And, by the way, those lines from “Endings” are reflected elsewhere in Sea Grapes, particularly in the title poem and in others like “Sunday Lemons,” “The Cloud,” “Ohio Winter” and “The Wind in the Dooryard.”

One or two of Walcott's myopic critics accuse him of moving narrowly from the elegiac to the barely concealed sentimental, of having two main voices only. I can't agree. His poetic range of expression is as wide as his human concerns and as all-of-a-piece as his sense of harmony and his preoccupation with the nature of love. As a matter of fact, some of Walcott's most memorable poems include cameos of irony, humor, satire, invective, vernacular wit, St. Lucian patois and classical pastiche. Yet for all that, in a poet so harmonious in sound and sense,

… the silence is all:
it is deeper than the readiness,
it is sea-deep,
earth-deep,
love-deep,

as he affirms in “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier.” And notice where he places love! Qualitatively, it is the most profoundly silent. For Walcott, love is the true silence, a condition of the unspoken will to connect, an absence of utterance stronger than thunder.

… it becomes unutterable
and must be said,
in a whimper,
in tears,
in the drizzle that comes to our eyes
not uttering the loved thing's name,
the silence of the dead,
the silence of the deepest buried love is
the one silence,
and whether we bear it for beast,
for child, for woman, or friend,
it is the one love, it is the same,
and it is blest
deepest by loss. …

Though he writes again and again of love as lost when it is enisled, as fading into nothingness when isolated, he does imagine it nevertheless as a force, as rain which will hammer the grass blades into the ground. In “Force” he names it for what it can also be: “love is iron.” And in “Winding Up”: “Love is a stone / that settled on the sea-bed / under grey water.”

Sea Grapes is Derek Walcott's sixth book of poems. There are other publications, brought out earlier in the Caribbean, which make rewarding reading today. I like looking back on those books and learning about his way forward from the clear trajectory of his burgeoning talent and unfolding confidence and control. He is a poet I respect and admire greatly. His work is accomplished and resonant in a concerned, people-centered way which I regard highly. And in that particular alone, Sea Grapes, along with Another Life, must be considered his most outstanding achievement so far.

Clarity and light, harmony and completeness in his finest poems are Walcott's gifts to all of us. Let him continue to reveal nuestra américa as he goes. Let us listen and look carefully as he redraws the old map with his songs of love and hope. I, for one, a wanderer far from home, a willful exile, a drifter-believer (the kind of runner Walcott himself has refused to become, staying rootedly in the Caribbean as he has all his writing years), will always listen to his acutely clear-sighted songs of love and hope and look at them again and again.