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By Mary Karr
Sunday, April 27, 2008;
Page BW12
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott is one of the great mongrels of American poetry, serving as a singular melting pot for a variety of traditions -- from Shakespeare's English to the patois of his grandmothers, who descended from slaves.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
Homer chronicled Odysseus's similar struggles with exile, and in Walcott's poem about Odyssey, Homer appears as "the blind giant" who heaves a trough in the ocean that Walcott then sails into.
That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
