Domhnall

This is only a small collection but somehow it seems to have within it nearly everything I hoped for. Walcott is such a confident, fluent poet. I can read his opening poem – The Lighthouse – across more than five full pages and only later notice the technique, especially his [near] rhyming of alternate lines, relaxed and unforced. He uses formal structure in diverse ways and for all I know he may strain and suffer to achieve his effects, but the effect is fluid and free. He seems to me to use different voices, and even to borrow a voice if required. I was brought up short, reading Stream, by the conviction that – to me - it sounds as Welsh as Dylan Thomas in its huge, breathless sentences and its sweep from contemporary politics to the almost ritual invoking of a Sixth Century Welsh bard. His poems have very diverse moods, too, from the blokey humour of The Lighthouse, meeting up for a boozy evening with an old pal, to the miserable shambles of an empty Brooklyn apartment in Winter Lamps, the cold and unattractive debris of a failed relationship. In the title poem he seethes with anger and truculence at the racism of the USA’s segregated South, whereas in The Light of the World he brings the warmest sentiments of appreciation and even love to his encounter with the ordinary people of St Lucia on a darkened bus in late evening, returning from a bustling market day. One of my favourite aspects of his writing is the way he can use the space of a poem to tell a story, to carry me along with him and show me unexpected wonders. But while he hints at travelling the globe, he becomes more irritable with distance from the beautiful West Indian islands, more humane and appealing when he returns and this is reflected in this collection. Indeed, in Tomorrow, Tomorrow, he is downbeat about travel:

A world’s outside the door, but how upsetting
to stand by your bags on a cold step as dawn
roses the brickwork and before you start regretting,
your taxi’s coming with one beep of its horn,
sidling to the kerb like a hearse – so you get in.