Poet's Choice

By Robert pinsky
Sunday, May 6, 2007

A new Selected Poems from a long-established, much-honored poet provides a new generation of readers with the opportunity to scan a career. A selection also encourages experienced readers to recall earlier parts of the career, to rediscover poems. From the recent Selected Poems of Derek Walcott, edited by Edward Baugh, here is Walcott's title poem from the earlier volume Sea Grapes, published in 1976 -- many years before Walcott took up Homeric material, transformed to a Caribbean setting, in his book-length poem Omeros:

SEA GRAPES

That sail which leans on light,

tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean;

that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name

in every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

between obsession and responsibility

will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough

from whose groundswell the great hexameters come

to the conclusions of exhausted surf

The classics can console. But not enough.

The poem sails in an engaging way between the realistic world of "wriggling on his sandals" and the literary perception that associates Homer's hexameter verses with the crashing of waves. Phrases such as "sour grapes" and "adulterer" bring the heroic references to Earth without rejecting them. The wry, gorgeous linking of past and present remains luminous -- amused maybe, but not merely debunking. The link between two eras, two oceans, two cultures is there in the sly rhyme of "Caribbean" with "Aegean"-- part of a glittering thread of like sounds that winds through Walcott's stanzas to terminate with the brusque, arresting plainness of the final phrase.

(Derek Walcott's poem "Sea Grapes" can be found in his book "Selected Poems," edited by Edward Baugh. Farrar Straus Giroux. [307 pp. $25] Copyright 2007 by Derek Walcott.)

Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States

from 1997 through 2000.