At a mundane banquet long ago I sat near an older man who was new in town; he had come alone. Partway through the meal I overheard him telling his story to the woman across the table: “People have been my life,” he said to her, and then again, “People have been my life.” He seemed to be insisting on something that he wanted badly to believe. As he went on, giving names and places, I found myself thinking, in the arrogance of my youth, that if such dull people had been his life, he could barely claim to have had one. I don't think I ever saw him again or spoke to him directly. But I still remember his nearly haunted voice and what it carried: how precarious and how precious our connections with others are.

Before I lapse into Streisandish rhapsodies about people who need people, let me turn to the subjects of this review: five books of prose by poets, two of them deliberate memoirs and all including at least some implicit autobiography. We learn a good deal about the authors of these texts, much of it fascinating and even valuable. Yet equally fascinating is what these books offer about the people around the authors—their friends, colleagues, rivals, lovers, wives, and ex-wives. Reading them one after another, I found myself pondering again the significance of the sheer, inevitable reality of our each being born into one specific position in the world. Whatever that place, and the trajectory our lives take from there, these texts suggest that our social location has a great deal to do with how we address the world—what we notice and ignore, what we consider natural and odd, what we accept or feel compelled to change if we can.

My first impulse was to couch all this in terms of privilege—what it means to have it, or not to have it, or to see (or think you see) it in others. These poets invite such consideration partly because their own lives have been so various in many ways, their work and opinions equally so. If they all might in some ways be seen as privileged—surely for their native gifts, some for the circumstances of their lives as well—every one is at some pains to offer a sense of his or her marginality and struggle. I suspect that such a felt sense of oppression or difficulty—call it what you will—is much more important to a poet's work than the often envious judgment of others. We can easily enough judge some of these poets—and even more of their friends and mentors—as privileged, but there is more to learn by avoiding such simplified politics and investigating more carefully their positions and connections and convictions. …

All poets, I suspect, hope that their prose will lead us back to their poems. Derek Walcott's What the Twilight Says sent me back to his epic Omeros with a new appreciation for the depth and subtlety of its ambitions. The most compelling section of Twilight is the first, with its three obliquely autobiographical essays in a rich, even baroque style: “When dusk heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and rusting iron which circle our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare, like the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp, is like a childhood signal to come home.” From the start, Walcott grapples with the poverty and deprivation of the islands—especially his birthplace, St. Lucia in the Lesser Antilles—and how such suffering might be “made lyrical”: “In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theatre is as vivid, voluble, and cheap.” Set apart from the poorest of the poor, intellectuals like Walcott must also contend with a sense of cultural poverty, of the need to assimilate the classics in compensation and yet also penetrate the amnesiac darkness of Caribbean history “to record the anguish of the race.”

Walcott was born into a complicated position; as he notes, the terms Ashanti and Warwickshire represent his two grandfathers' roots. Entangled in the islands' history of slavery, racism, and suffering, he is drawn to radicals such as the social critic Frantz Fanon and the poet Aimé Césaire, both born on neighboring Martinique. Yet his own vision is too complex and ambivalent for straightforward activism. He finds not only “the wish to be white” but also the “longing to become black” inadequate responses, mere “careers.” His desire is for a deeper, more culturally engaged identity, and so he regrets that the islands have not “been fed long with the mulch of cultures, with the cycles of tribalism, feudalism, monarchy, democracy, industrialization.” A banal “return to the bush” will not suffice, and English literature is also difficult, “hallowed ground and trespass.” Anger may be a start, however imperfect. The book's first (and title) essay ends with a searing evocation of

the inevitable problem of all island artists: the choice of home or exile, self-realization or spiritual betrayal of one's country. Travelling widens this breach. Choice grows more melodramatic with every twilight. When twenty years ago we imagined cities devoted neither to power nor to money but to art, one had the true vision. Everything else has been the sweated blurring of a mirror in which the people might have found their true reflection.

Walcott writes with nearly stunning intensity of the island life, its heat and beauty and poverty, its race and class antagonisms, and his determination to wrestle from it an art equal to its complexities. The specifics of privation on St. Lucia are far different from those of northern Vermont, but Walcott shows some distant affinities with Carruth as he muses on the compensations of growing up with too few books, theaters, and museums, with “simply not enough to do”: “[D]eprived of books, a man must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to order it, will come the urge to record. … There can be virtues in deprivation, and certainly one virtue is salvation from a cascade of high mediocrity, since books are now not so much created as remade.”

When Walcott turns his attention to other writers, his views are similarly intense and provocative. He assesses Robert Lowell, for instance, with an admiration that only barely avoids idolatry. Writing generously about the difficult last years of Lowell's life and career, he notes that “Lowell blessed others before he blessed himself.” Less convincingly, he claims that “after Imitations Lowell had reached a happiness in his work in which all poetry was his. He had made the body of literature his body, all styles his style, every varying voice his own.”

If loyalty occasionally overwhelms judgment, Walcott's editorial “we” also strains its bonds at times, as when he writes, “We love [Philip] Larkin, and that is it, simply.” This “we” does not include me—I have never had a simple response to Larkin, though I do love many things about his work. But such excesses are preferable to excessive timidity, and I feel richly compensated by the many abrupt insights these essays toss off, often casually. Walcott is especially astute on the pitfalls of trying to write at the very highest levels: “As their lines become marmoreal, poets hear their own echo as oracles. This happened to Eliot with The Four Quartets, to Stevens in the plummy vacancies of his later work, to Pound as he began to screech, even to Williams once he felt the laurel tightening on his forehead.”

The sharp and stimulating analyses Walcott offers of Hemingway, Frost, Naipaul, and Joseph Brodsky are too complex to summarize briefly here, but they are worth investigating. This book makes no claim to systematic “coverage” or an overarching thesis, but its overriding obsession with the place of the provincial in the world gives it coherence. When Walcott writes of Naipaul that “the provincial, the colonial, can never civilize himself beyond his province,” he speaks for himself as well. Given Walcott's sophistication, his literary friendships, and his worldwide connections, the claim may seem a bit disingenuous. Yet beneath it lies, I think, a fierce and admirable effort not to be “civilized” entirely away from his colonial past, not to suffer the “absorption into what is envied” that he sees as Naipaul's fate. Walcott's Nobel lecture muses on persistence and transformation within the polyglot island culture, in a passage that might serve as a manifesto for his own work and that of many others in our polyglot age:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles. … Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. …

Biologists use the term “microenvironments” to describe the significant variations within what may seem a single landscape. The north and south sides of a boulder, for example, may have very different levels of temperature, sunshine, even rainfall, and therefore may support far different sets of flora and fauna. Careful, precise attention is needed even to notice, much less to understand, such small but crucial realities.

The same is true, I would suggest, within human lives. The work of poets and writers is largely devoted to portraying such microenvironments with the greatest possible depth, passion, and exactness. Such work often reveals the counterintuitive contraries that run within our stereotypes and habitual sets: the compensations of apparent privation, the costs of privilege, the importance to lives and careers of specific events, people, and relationships. The mark of the true writer is to scant neither the truth within the stereotypes nor that within the contraries, but somehow to bring them all to us. This is no mere dualism, but a continuum of many forces and levels of reality—geographic, financial, sexual, familial. To define a position, to know one's true place in the world, is never an easy thing. But from it all else follows.