White Egrets: A Review
Thursday, 22 July 2010
If you are an aging laureate poet, there are several ways to take a vow before that good night: You can whine in evident rhymes against the dying of the light à la Philip Larkin, carry prose to your deathbed as Neruda, or do as Derek Walcott does and reign and ride your horse, stately and dignified to that “green thicket of oblivion.” Although I tend to be wary of respectability in poets and of Walcott in particular, this well-tempered meditation on loss and time from the venerable master merits as many intelligent verse readers as there are mortal ones.
For those who are not familiar with Walcott, this collection of kin, but independent poems, can be a great introduction to the St. Lucian’s work. All the old topoi are there: history and willed amnesia, the boon of emptiness, lust and misogyny, the synesthesia of landscape and print, the American dance of old-world dancers, the mastery of enjambment and rhyme still classic and classical, in a language still resistant. And then some new plot twists for the cognoscenti: Although much older than most poets when they have their go at it, Walcott’s direct reckoning with mortality offers a refreshing sentiment absent from the rest: a titanic serenity.
Whence this serenity in a work rife with Yeatsean ferment? After an initial run over such sequences as the “Sicilian suite” or the “Spanish series,” the lusts of this “egret-haired viejo” excerpted from a “Latin American novel,” who “shakes with some invisible sorrow, some obscene affliction, and chronicles it secretly, till it shows in his face,” almost obliged me to dismiss the collection as the inadequate valediction of a Caribbean Aschenbach. Then I noticed a figure in the embroidery that made me reconsider. On from the first poem and steady to the end we find an intermittent, near pre-Socratic battle between stasis and flight,
…the white gasp of an egret sent
sailing into the frame then teetering to rest
with its gawky stride, erect, an egret-emblem!
Similar transitions overwhelm the collection until they become the dominant key, such as the opening line from “Forty Acres” (to Barack Obama), “Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving—” or these ones from “Elegy” (to Aimé Césaire), “I sent you, in Martinique, maître,/the unfolding letter of a sail, a letter.” This is not a death in Venice after all. Quite the contrary, instead of degenerating, through this device our poet keeps his cool on the slippery slope of time by a constant re-staging of the scene of mortification and resurrection. His lust and desires become then another flavor of flight, bound too for the monumental white page of oblivion that in turn generates new text, new lusts.
Love
lies underneath it all though, the more surprising
the death, the deeper the love, the tougher the life [...]
Your death is like our friendship beginning over.
As a young artist, Walcott promised that he would not make his life public “until [he had] learnt to suffer/In accurate iambics,” and this hard-earned victory over prurient exhibitionism transfigures into an elegant rejoinder to the poet’s inevitable end. It is no coincidence then the collection opens with a comparison between the terra-cotta warriors of Qin Shi Huang to “our” vows; nor that the book closes with an image of a page going “white again” as the book closes. In totem, White Egrets reads as the living monument to a life’s pledge to the taming of verse, and with it the fear of time itself. The redemptive serenity that radiates from the poems comes then not from the turbulence of a heart that for all intents and purposes remains pubescent right to the end, nor from its self-awareness, but from its obdurate insistence on boxing passion within accurate iambics, despite the vital resistance from memory and hope.
Kamau Brathwaite may as well have been referring to Walcott when he cryptically warned in a conversation we had last year that “the problem is boxes.” To this, Walcott would now retort, “the perpetual idea is astonishment.” In other words, Walcott is here acknowledging that the presence of the steady, of the fixed (i.e. the perpetual idea) is the source of our relationship to the new (i.e. astonishment). In a collection populated by elegies and burials, coming from a water-colorist who has made it his life’s second-calling to frame Caribbean escapes, the box or boundary exists not only as a porous foil to flux, but as the artist’s source of composure and delight:
Accept it. Watch how spray will burst
llike a cat scrambling up the side of the wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Review Literature and Arts of the Americas, © 2010 Alex Gil; Review Literature and Arts of the Americas is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp
No. 1 — August 5th, 2010 at 5:13 am
[...] even better. I have wrestled with this conundrum recently in my overblown review of Walcott’s White Egret. I rightly predicted that my print editor would curb my enthusiasm by deleting the baroque out of [...]
No. 2 — October 29th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
[...] juste, bravo! I have wrestled with this conundrum recently in my overblown review of Walcott’s White Egrets. I rightly predicted that my print editor would curb my enthusiasm by deleting the baroque out of [...]
No. 3 — January 22nd, 2011 at 8:40 am
[...] the end of the essay he prescribes restraint in a manner that, at least for me, augurs some of Derek Walcott‘s relationship to poetic form: Mais une mystérieuse discipline commande à l’inverse [...]
No. 4 — March 27th, 2011 at 5:25 pm
I am extremely concerned concerning the next election. When I think about the trouble that is occuring in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East (not to mention our own economy) we desperately should be looking for a superior leader. I’m not convinced that Barack Obama or any of the Republican challengers so far have the experience or skills it takes to do the job the way it needs to be done. Being president of this country is an incredibly difficult job. Do you think there is anyone out there with the experience, skill, and moral courage to do the job?
No. 5 — September 5th, 2011 at 2:09 pm
We are a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your website provided us with valuable information to work on. You’ve done an impressive job and our whole community will be thankful to you.
No. 6 — October 16th, 2011 at 5:03 am
Hey There was just surfing through the net looking for some new interesting material when i discovered this post on yahoo search. I had to write you a comment to say that I actually liked this article. I simply cannot discover a lot top quality anymore on the web anymore with all the trash on the market so any time I do come across a excellent post I cherish it. Keep up the wonderful job and I am convinced this site is going to go a long ways and turn out to be extremely well-liked
No. 7 — October 27th, 2011 at 9:02 am
I was recommended this web site by my cousin. I am not sure whether this post is written by him as no one else know such detailed about my trouble. You’re amazing! Thanks!
No. 8 — October 31st, 2011 at 12:38 am
Coming from my notice, shopping for electronic products online may be easily expensive, yet there are some guidelines that you can use to acquire the best things. There are usually ways to locate discount specials that could help to make one to ge thet best electronic devices products at the smallest prices. Thanks for your blog post.
No. 9 — November 5th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I heard about writingscore.com, I haven’t tried them so I’m wondering if they’re any good?
No. 10 — November 20th, 2011 at 9:46 am
Hi, I found your website by Aol search engine. figured I should take a look around. I would read your site frequently. Look forward to checking out your some of your posts again.
No. 11 — November 23rd, 2011 at 12:36 am
Great post. I was checking continuously this blog and I am impressed! Very useful information specially the last part
I care for such info a lot. I was seeking this particular info for a long time. Thank you and best of luck.
No. 12 — November 26th, 2011 at 7:06 am
Just wish to say your article is as astonishing. The clarity in your post is simply nice and i could assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission let me to grab your feed to keep updated with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the rewarding work.
No. 13 — January 5th, 2012 at 3:12 am
There are – or were some wonderful old “Ghost Towns” in Idaho – off the Yankee Fork and up off Anderson Lake. Up off the Yankee Fork was the old dredge they had used to dredge the gold out of the river – ruined the river – and when the gold ran out they left it where it stopped. Silver City was another old town up there. Some of the old towns are on “private” land now so you can’t go back to them. It was always interestin-g to see that the people left everything – just walked out in some cases – furniture – not much – but what they had – was still there – dust covered – waiting for someone to return – perhaps they do.buy Tera gold
No. 14 — January 5th, 2012 at 3:14 am
The undergroun-d tour in Seattle – a city built on top of a city due to a fire! The buildings, etc. are still underneath and are available for tour.buy wow gold
No. 15 — January 27th, 2012 at 4:40 am
and take care for hairs.when one is…
getting hairline back, one may feel lack of confidence in both the ways; social and mental. this is because losing hairs not only makes the person bald but also elder than what actually he ages.definition of hair lossalopecia is nothing but…