While perusing some thirty new books in preparation for writing this chronicle, and narrowing the selection to five, I have been struck by the vitality of new voices, the hardy persistence of veteran poets whose presence is all too easy to take for granted, the continuing vigor of the metrical tradition, and by the variety of what is being written and published. The pervasiveness of irony in many of these poems has also led me to ask questions about this double-sided approach to rhetoric.

Another question, in addition to wondering about irony, that engaged my attention while reading these books was whether poets chose to write what might be called the “situated” poem, or the “statement” poem. Both have long histories. An example of the statement poem might be Philip Larkin's “This Be the Verse,” which begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” The mum and dad are generic parents, the “you” is everyone. A situated poem in the same Freudian mode is Robert Lowell's “Man and Wife,” which begins, “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed; / the rising sun in war paint dyes us red.” The mum here is Charlotte Winslow Lowell of Boston, whose troubled psychological legacy is represented by an antique bed, part of the inherited “loot” that occupies so much of the poet's attention in Life Studies.

Situated poems are, accurately, associated with the modern era; think of “The Wild Swans at Coole” by Yeats: “The trees are in their autumn beauty, / The woodland paths are dry …” But then one remembers Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” published in 1798, where the scenery of the Wye Valley triggers a reverie: “Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion.”

In truth the type goes back centuries. John Donne's “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day,” 1633, begins, “'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,” a location in time even more precise than Lowell's “These are the tranquilized Fifties, / and I am forty.” Yet even as early as the reign of James I, poets were clever enough to adopt the pose of general statement and then narrow it to fit a particular case, as Sir Walter Raleigh did in his touching and witty sonnet, “Three Things There Be,” a warning from the Tower to his profligate son.

Still, more than any other period in literary history, the twentieth century has favored the situated poem, with its reliance on imagery and particularity. …

The Bounty, by Derek Walcott, reveals the Caribbean-born Nobel laureate in a contemplative mood, reflecting on his life and on his island home, St. Lucia. In “Spain” and “Italian Eclogues” he expatiates on landscapes and cultures other than his own. He is at his best, however, when focusing on the two themes he has made indelibly his own: the island where he lives, and the way the culture and history of the Caribbean are fatefully intertwined with the geographically faraway continent of Europe. Walcott is a past master of the situated poem—situated as to place, culture, and history at many levels.

The writing here displays the defects of its qualities. The tone of unhurried contemplation, the long lines and blocks of verse allow Walcott plenty of breathing room; his poetry at its best rises to a grandeur hardly ever seen in these depressingly plainspoken days. The current book has its share of longueurs, however, and I think some of this may be attributed to Walcott's formal choices: page after page presents blocks of print unbroken into stanzas (though the title poem employs tercets and a rhyme scheme loosely based on terza rima). In an elegy to Joseph Brodsky he says, “You refreshed forms and stanzas.” Perhaps Walcott himself should consider returning to some of the marvelously varied technical experimentation of his early work.

But my impression is that he indulges himself here on purpose. The sameness of the verse form allows him, when the Muse is attentive, to go deeply into his moods and perceptions. Passages in this book are simply gorgeous—grand and inventive, down-to-earth and elevated at the same time. Here, from the title poem, is a variation on a line by Dante:

“In la sua volonta è nostra pace,”
In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbors,
in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons
left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labours
of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence,
shadow and light, who live next door like neighbours …

“The Bounty” is both an elegy for the poet's mother and a poetic credo in which lines of ants are an emblem for the poetic line: “let the ants teach me again with the long lines of words, / my business and duty, the lesson you taught your sons, / to write of the light's bounty on familiar things / that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news …”

If cultural theorists have reduced postcolonial experience to a massive yawn, that's not Derek Walcott's fault. His evocations of the imperial center as sensed from a distant colonial outpost—humorous, celebratory at times, perceptively critical but never strident or posturing—are among the glories of late-twentieth-century poetry. The four-part sequence “Signs” shows that Europe's mythic presence in the mind of the colonial subject has not ceased to excite Walcott to some of his best writing:

Europe fulfilled its silhouette in the nineteenth century
with steaming train-stations, gas-lamps, encyclopedias,
the expanding waists of empires, an appetite for inventory
in the novel as a market roaring with ideas.
Bound volumes echoed city-blocks of paragraphs
with ornate parenthetical doorways, crowds on one margin
waiting to cross to the other page …

Today's bright idea in cultural criticism is to reduce everything to “commodity”; Walcott shows he is aware of that idea, but demonstrates that the interplay between ideas and goods, art and power, setting and spirit, the insubstantial and the quantifiable, is much more complex and interesting than the essentially Marxist notion that art is an effluence rising from the push and shove of economics: “We become one of those, then, / who convert the scarves of cirrus at dusk to a diva's / adieu from an opera balcony, ceilings of cherubs, cornucopias / disgorging stone fruit, the setting for a believer's / conviction in healing music …” Walcott has always been, in the broad sense, a believer; and that is what makes his poetry, at its best, such powerful spiritual nourishment.