Derek Walcott 1930-2017； 'Poems That Make Grown Men Cry,'
Derek Walcott 1930-2017
Homecoming: Anse la Raye
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"Poetry, is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow", claimed Walcott in his Nobel speech. Here, the poet of the Caribbean, illustrates this apparent ease of writing and shows us how fragmented memory is central to his poetry. (for Garth St Omer)
Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned only, when her looms fade, drilled in our skulls, the doom- surge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage under the coconuts' salt-rusted swords, these rotted leathery sea-grape leaves, the seacrabs' brittle helmets, and this barbecue of branches, like the ribs of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand; only this fish-gut reeking beach whose frigate stuck like buzzards overhead whose spindly, sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows because your clothes, your posture seem a tourist's. They swarm like flies round your heart's sore.
Suffer them to come, entering their needle's eye knowing whether they live or die, what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, all this you knew, but never guessed you'd come to know there are homecomings without home.
You give them nothing. Their curses melt in air. The black cliffs scowl, the ocean sucks its teeth, like that long dugout canoe like a small petal fallen in a cup, reflecting nothing but its image, you sway, reflecting nothing. The freighter's silvery ghost is gone, the children gone. Dazed by the sun you trudge back to the village past the white, salty esplanade under whose palms, dead fishermen move their draughts in shade, crossing, eating their islands, and one, with a politician's ignorant, sweet smile, nods as if all fate swayed in his lifted hand.
Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott dies aged 87 in St Lucia
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionDerek Walcott was one of the Caribbean's best known writers
Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott has died aged 87 at his home in the Caribbean island of St Lucia after a long illness, local media reports say.
He was regarded by critics as one of the greatest Caribbean poets.
The writer's collections include In A Green Night: Poems 1948 - 1960 and his epic work, Omeros, which draws on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2011.
His winning collection for the TS Eliot Prize, White Egrets, was called "a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet" by the judges.
The Nobel Committee, announcing his prize, said: "His poetry acquires at one and the same time singular lustre and great force... Walcott's style is melodious and sensitive."
The poet won many other prizes, including a MacArthur Foundation award - the so-called "genius grant".
Walcott said at the time: "It's nice to get it, because it gives you four or five years of a great deal of security - the tough thing is when it's finished!
"It has a very bad connotation, this idea of a 'genius' - I'm not denying the fact that I'm prodigious, I'm not denying the fact that I wrote well... to me it's a gift. I feel blessed that I was gifted."
Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1992, he said he had written as far back as he could remember, and recalled his mother, a schoolteacher, reciting Shakespeare at home.
His father, who died while he was still an infant, had also written poetry, he said.
"I heard that kind of sound at home from when I was very young," he said. "I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry."
Born in 1930, he studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, before moving to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.
He published his first collection, 25 Poems, at the age of 18. He was also an accomplished painter and playwright.
Image captionWalcott in 1992 - the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize
The Cultural Development Foundation of St Lucia has paid tribute to Walcott, saying in a statement: "The world has lost one of its noted literary icons.
"Our sympathies extend to St Lucia as a nation, who without doubt are proud and honoured to call him a true son of St Lucia.
"He was very vocal about the island's culture and heritage, and its preservation, and his love for St Lucia and the Caribbean was evident in his numerous mentions of 'home' in his work."
Speaking about the shock of returning home to St Lucia, Walcott said: "You had to balance off the beauty of the place with some of the poverty around you."
Walcott was also embroiled in controversy over his candidacy for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2009.
He pulled out of the race after academics at the university received dozens of anonymous letters linking him to an allegation of sexual harassment in 1982.
But in this fascinating anthology, one hundred men distinguished in literature and film, science and architecture, theater and human rights;confess to being moved to tears by poems that continue to haunt them. Representing twenty nationalities and ranging in age from their early 20s to their late 80s, the majority are public figures not prone to crying. Here they admit to breaking down when ambushed by great art, often in words as powerful as the poems themselves.
Their selections include classics by visionaries such as Walt Whitman, W.H Auden, and Philip Larkin, as well as contemporary works by masters including Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and poets who span the globe from Pablo Neruda to Rabindranath Tagore.
Seventy-five percent of the selected poems were written in the twentieth century, with more than a dozen by women including Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Their themes range from love in its many guises, through mortality and loss, to the beauty and variety of nature. Three men have suffered the pain of losing a child; others are moved to tears by the exquisite way a poet captures, in Alexander Pope's famous phrase;what oft was thought, but neer so well express.
From J. J. Abrams to John le Carré, Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Radcliffe to Nick Cave, Billy Collins to Stephen Fry, Stanley Tucci to Colin Firth, and Seamus Heaney to Christopher Hitchens, this collection delivers private insight into the souls of men whose writing, acting, and thinking are admired around the world.(less)
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published April 1st 2014 by Simon & Schuster
Book Review: 'Poems That Make Grown Men Cry,' edited by Anthony and Ben Holden
You don't need a degree in creative writing to be brought to tears by verse.
By
BARTON SWAIM
April 11, 2014 3:22 p.m. ET
Terry George, the Irish screenwriter and director, chokes up whenever he reads Seamus Heaney's "Requiem for the Croppies." The sonnet is an acutely condensed retelling of the 1798 Irish rebellion, a series of battles in which an army of mostly peasants—"the pockets of our greatcoats full of barley"—tried to throw off British rule. He's right; the last three lines, recalling the rebellion's final battle on June 21, catch in the throat:
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave,
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.
Mr. George is one of the 100 men Anthony and Ben Holden queried for their anthology of "Poems That Make Grown Men Cry." The editors aren't trying to make the case for poetry—perhaps a hopeless task in our time—but the book does it anyway. Poetry, so easily assumed to be merely weird self-expression since the death of rhyme and meter, isn't that at all: It's the arrangement of language into rhythmical structures to make it say what it can't say otherwise. The Holdens remind us that you don't have to be an academic or a postgraduate in creative writing to be moved by verse. Or, indeed, brought to tears by it.
Poems That Make GrownMen Cry
Edited by Anthony and Ben Holden Simon & Schuster, 310 pages, $25
The editor Harold Evans couldn't fight them back reading Wordsworth's "Character of the Happy Warrior" at a colleague's funeral. The critic Clive James sheds them for his parents at "Canoe" by Keith Douglas. The novelist Sebastian Faulks cries over Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" (a marvelous poem—though not, I would have thought, one likely to induce tears). Despite the slight hokeyness of the whole idea, the overall effect is to make excellent poetry seem like what it is: a wholly accessible language with its own range of expression and its own pleasures.
The collection has its biases. Anthony Holden is a journalist and biographer, his son a writer and film producer, and the men included are mostly writers, academics, actors and filmmakers. Most of them are English, as the editors are, and consequently the poems are mostly British in provenance: W.H. Auden and Thomas Hardy are the favorites; Philip Larkin isn't far behind.
The vast majority of the poems reprinted here are not, as the title might suggest, mawkish or melodramatic. The best are haunting. The novelist Alexander McCall Smith names Auden's rather enigmatic lyric about unanswerable questions, "If I Could Tell You": "If we should weep when clowns put on their show, / If we should stumble when musicians play, / Time will say nothing but I told you so." But it quickly becomes clear that much of one's emotional response depends on the circumstances in which a poem is encountered. The actor Patrick Stewart's choice of Edna St. Vincent Millay's admittedly wonderful "God's World" has less to do with Millay's lines themselves, it seems, than with the way the poem reminds him of seeing a New England autumn for the first time ("Lord, I do fear / Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year").
A few of the poems are moving in their own right, with or without explanation. I had never read Robert Graves's "The Cool Web," submitted by the literary scholar John Sutherland, a near-perfect four-stanza meditation on the human need to explain away what scares or delights us: "There's a cool web of language winds us in, / Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: / We grow sea-green at last and coldly die / In brininess and volubility." If you have never read Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," chosen here by the poet Paul Muldoon, be prepared.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 ("When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"), chosen by the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, isn't so wrenching as Jarrell's poem, but Mr. Bragg's short explanation makes the sonnet pierce to the heart. Shakespeare's reflections on the long-ago death of a friend remind Mr. Bragg "of my first wife, who took her life more than forty years ago. I feel as responsible, as guilty, and as ashamed now as I was then."
I defy anyone not to enjoy the Holdens' book: It's plain fun. But it has evangelistic potential as well. Two centuries ago our celebrities were not actors or singers but poets. Poetry has now all but disappeared from public life, with the consequence that we are cut off from an entire mode of thought—not unlike losing math or philosophy. Can it be revived? I don't know, but if a book full of lachrymose men can help, I'm for it.
—Mr. Swaim is writing a book on political language and public life.
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