Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, April 27, 2008

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

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.

Walcott's recent work in The Prodigal captures a more familiar saga, in lines I find his most powerful to date: an aging man still trapped between longing and the physical confines of old age.

Desire and disease commingling,

commingling, the white hair and the white page

with the fear of white sight, blindness, amputation,

a recurring kidney stone, the plague of AIDS,

shaken in the mirror by that bewildered look,

the truculence, the drooping lip of a spiritual lout.

Look at it any way you like, it's an old man's book

whenever you write it, whenever it comes out,

the age in your armpits in the pleats of your crotch,

the faded perfumes of cherished conversations,

and the toilet gurgling its ecologues, resurrecting names

in its hoarse swiveling into an echo after.

This is the music of memory, water.

("Sea Grapes" from "Collected Poems 1948-1984," copyright 1986 Farrar Straus Giroux. "I'm just a red nigger . . . " comes from the poem "The Schooner Flight" in the same book. The last lines quoted here are from "The Prodigal," copyright 2004, Farrar Straus Giroux.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."