Derek Walcott
White Egrets: Poems
Faber and Faber, 2010
96 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0571254736

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One year on from the absurdities of the 2009 Oxford professor of poetry furor, Derek Walcott remains one of our most capable, eloquent poets. A new collection, White Egrets, finds the 80-year-old St Lucian in fine form, combining an energetic delight in poetic form with a knack for conveying elegiac weariness. These are poems of strength and intelligence, elegantly constructed and adroitly observed snapshots of contemporary life. But this is also a work that reveals a Prospero-like personality, the record of a stoic individual determined—perhaps understandably—to put up walls between himself and the world.

There is a double pull at work in the collection, underlined early on in a passage from “Sicilian Suite”:

There never really was a ‘we’ or ‘ours’;
whatever each enjoyed was separate:
a drizzle’s drift, the slant of arrowing showers
on a hot road, on roofs, made them elate,
but with a joy defined by separation.

This exuberant delight in separateness is the hallmark of many of the poems contained here. “I’m content as Kavanagh [the great Irish rural poet] with his few acres”, Walcott writes elsewhere in the book, “for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea’s lace, / to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts”. Such intense insularity is all the more striking because it appears in a poem with an almost embarrassingly square-toothed title (“The Lost Empire”), a poem in which lyrical expressionism sits at odds with sharp commentary on the legacy of European imperialism. Indeed, Walcott seems eager always to be moving between political and personal dimensions; he can veer suddenly from talk of “Conradian docks” and “old English forts” to withdrawn, neo-symbolist evocations of the natural world, sometimes within the space of a single line. But this tension—between urbane worldly engagement and fierce romantic escapism, even outright solipsism—is what makes White Egrets such a compelling and enjoyable work.

There are a number of poems that deal with the “we” Walcott appears to jettison in “Sicilian Suite”. “Forty Acres”, written for Barack Obama, is optimistically public-minded, with its field that “lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure / light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower” (note how Walcott’s Kavanaghian acres have been supplanted here by an expansive open field). A variation on the same theme, “44” is a moving record of 21st-century black community and consciousness, a portrait of a Caribbean barber expectantly “waiting for Obama”:

Polo is young, black, bald under his baseball cap
but more than a barber he is delicate, adept
and when I leave his throne, shake shorn hair from my lap
I feel changed, like an election promise that is kept.

Such sober social realism contrasts nicely with the Sturm und Drang interludes in poems like “The Lost Empire”. Similarly, another socially engaged piece describes a dockworker who has lost “a leg to rum and diabetes”:

You would watch him shrink
into his nickname, not too proud to beg,
who would roar like a lorry revving in the prime of his drink.

Elsewhere, in “The Acacia Trees”, there is commentary on the “doomed acres” (that word again!) of St Lucia’s beaches, “where yet another luxury hotel will be built / with ordinary people fenced out”. At such moments, the enclosure of physical space is, briefly, viewed in conventionally pejorative terms, and Walcott seems comfortable to play the communitarian spokesperson, stepping out of himself to survey his surroundings with alertness and verbal precision. There is no doubting the sincerity of these mimetic pieces, nothing at all opportunistic or forced about them, and Walcott’s ability to convey political motifs with such technical élan and economy is considerable. Perhaps the collection would have benefited from more poems in this mold.

While Walcott can document St Lucian spaces with remarkable pathos, he is also an eager internationalist. White Egrets takes in a remarkable range of locales—Barcelona, Sicily, London, Stockholm, New York, Amsterdam—and in this respect Walcott shows himself to be a worthy inheritor of literary modernism’s preoccupation with exile and voyages of exploration. But this is no mere trite inversion of Conrad; in fact, in his geographical restlessness, Walcott seems closer to sophisticated modernist emigrés like D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. Traces of Pound are also evident in Walcott’s palpable New World obsession with European culture. A long sequence of poems titled “In Italy” is littered with allusions to Canaletto, Caravaggio, Renaissance princes and churches (Uccello, van Gogh, Bacon, and El Greco crop up elsewhere). The predilection for reeling off long lists of high cultural references can seem tokenistic, as in the more abstruse moments of high modernism, though it does make for a colourful backdrop. Much time is spent eating ice creams in Florence, reading the morning papers in London, and listening to the “soft enquiries of the cocktail piano” in the bar of the Grand Hotel, Brussels. The purview of White Egrets is expansive and wide-ranging, even if the depiction of such rarefied spaces has an air of gratuitousness about it.

Yet time and time again, White Egrets finds Walcott departing from this cosmopolitan frame, shrinking into himself like that alcoholic, diabetic dockworker. The birds of the work’s title are a recurring motif, and they seem to stand for something like an acceptance of the limits of communication, emblems of ineffability like the mysterious, beautiful subjects of W.B. Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole”. As a line in the title poem makes clear, the egrets reflect back at Walcott a “purposeful silence, a language beyond speech”, and it is this sense of a resounding, conclusive silence that is most characteristic of the collection as a whole. In the same poem, the birds are described as being both “spectral” and “sepulchral”. It is a telling elision, and one that captures the note of portentousness to be found in many of these works. There are references to “crypts” and “seraphic souls”, and some frank valedictory admissions: “I know what I’ve done, I cannot look beyond. / I treated all of them badly, my three wives”.

Also in the title poem, Walcott expresses a wish to arrive at a “peace / beyond desires and beyond regrets”; and it is difficult finally to resist the conclusion that he has, to paraphrase Geoffrey Hill, written an elegy for himself. With desire and regret exorcised, all that remains is serene, magnanimous, poetry:

Some friends, the few I have left,
are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain
as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift
like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.

White Egrets is the work of a poet journeying all over the planet and ultimately turning his back on it with a good deal of dignified grace. While it would be tempting to draw some rather obvious parallels between this attitude and the march of events over the last two years, the truth is that Walcott probably isn’t too bothered to have missed out on a quasi-public appointment with a meagre stipend in a land-locked English town. The mood of sombre resignation that permeates many of these poems seems to have a lot more to do with an elderly writer’s desire to retreat into the island of himself, and to derive endless inspiration, as Walcott has always done, from the surrounding sea.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

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“But I don’t think that’s fair”. The press has caught Ruth Padel redhanded in the “smear” campaign against Derek Walcott. (“Smear” may be a misnomer: as Katy Evans-Bush notes on the Guardian website, a “smear” is a “slanderous untruth“, and Walcott himself admitted that some of the allegations against him are true.) According to the Times, Padel sent an e-mail to journalists last month in which she said:

Some [of my] supporters add that what [Derek Walcott] does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment and that Obama is rumoured to have turned him down for his inauguration poem because of the sexual period. But I don’t think that’s fair.

Padel, who resigned from the position this week, acknowledges that she sent the e-mails, though she defended herself in a message to the Guardian. The problem for her is that even if she had nothing to do with the anonymous packages that appeared in Oxford dons’ mailboxes with photocopied passages from The Lecherous Professor, she is herself a lying professor. The Times dredges up a 12 May quote in which Padel said: “Neither they [my campaign managers] nor I mentioned Walcott’s harassment record and had nothing to do with any behind-doors operation.” Her disclaimer about “any behind-doors operation” might be true, but she clearly did mention Walcott’s harassment record.

If Walcott is looking for solace, he might find it in an homage by Clive James. James–perhaps inspired by the New York Times‘ lament on the “lost art of reading aloud“–reads his poetic paean to Walcott on the website of the Guardian and at this month’s Hay Literary Festival in Wales. (Sidenote: James’s reference to “railway station porters [who] with one impatient word rape teenage daughters” does seem like a strange way of paying tribute to a man who stands accused of sexual harrassment.) Meanwhile, Walcott does not stand alone as the honoree of an homage by a prominent poet: Douglas Hogg, who in recent weeks has also had his named dragged through the mud (or, more precisely, through the moat) is the subject of a new couplet by the recently elected poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy:

What did we do with the trust of your vote?

Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.

Duffy isn’t the first poet laureate to tackle a timely topic. Her predecessor Andrew Motion recently wrote five sonnets about climate change that will function as the libretto for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new symphony, slated to debut at King’s College Cambridge on 13 June. Meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement takes a look at Motion’s new collection of poems, The Cinder Path; reviewer Peter McDonald suggests that the collection borders on bathos, but by Motion’s standards, that counts as a warm reception. When he was named poet laureate in 1999 (a position that entitles him to a “butt of sack“), one anonymous critic compared Motion’s life work to a sack of something else.

The Horrors of Train Travel. A world away from Clive James’s “railway station porters”, FT columnist Matthew Engel analyses the lesser evils of rail transport in his new book Eleven Minutes Late. The Guardian reviews Engel’s book and pines for the days when the bar on The Flying Scotsman featured 32 cocktails. (Now, its menu merely offers a “selection of Schweppes mixers”.)

The High-Flying Welshman. Meanwhile, Matthew Engel himself travels to Wales for the Hay Festival (though he doesn’t say what mode of transport he used for the journey). Engel seeks to explain how a town of 2,000 became home to 30 second-hand bookstores and an international literary festival that Bill Clinton christened as the “Woodstock of the Mind“. The story revolves around Richard Booth, who graduated from Oxford in 1961, set up a store in his family’s Welsh hometown, and soon tranformed Hay into a booklovers’ mecca. Along the way, he crowned himself king of the independent state of Hay-on-Wye and–more recently–launched a long-shot bid for European Parliament on the Socialist Labour line.

Not Feeling the Festive Spirit? The other major literary festival this past weekend was Calabash in Jamaica, and last year’s headliner (Walcott) was not in attendance. Indeed, he almost certainly wasn’t invited back. The poet who allegedly sought to seduce his female students made no attempt to seduce his Caribbean colleagues in 2008; rather, he used the occasion to lash out at the Trinidadian Nobel laureate VS Naipaul:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.

Auden on Screen…and Auden on Screen. An Oxford professor of poetry maligning a highly respected colleague? History repeats itself, as History Boys veteran Alan Bennett notes. Bennett’s “The Habit of the Art” explores the tempestuous relationship between WH Auden (a onetime holder of Padel’s new post) and composer Benjamin Britten: after a productive collaboration in the 1930s, Auden was “crudely disparaging” of Britten’s later work. (One hopes that the aforementioned collaboration between poet Motion and composer Davies ends on a more positive note.) This week, Variety reports that the National Theatre will bring the Auden-Britten drama to cinemas across Britain as part of its NT Live programme.

Speaking of poetic homages to questionable characters, the Times Literary Supplement reveals that in the mid-1930s, Auden wrote three “peasant folk songs eulogizing [Lenin] and promoting Stalin as his political heir“. The songs were for a Russian propaganda film commissioned by Stalin to mark the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The British Film Institute will present the movie and the accompanying Auden poems at an 8 June event on its Southbank stage.

Spies Like Mom? MI5 sought to prove that Auden aided Soviet spies but could never close the case. Meanwhile, two children growing up on the English countryside in the 1960s seek to determine whether their mother was a Soviet spy in Georgina Harding’s newest novel, reviewed in this week’s New York Times. In the Washington Times, David Chambers has no qualms about admitting that his grandfather was a Soviet spy, but he laments the fact that Susan Jacoby, author of Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, won’t acknowledge that new findings from the Soviet archives “seal the coffin…on Mr. Hiss’ guilt”. (ORB excoriated Jacoby for other omissions in last week’s edition.) The New Haven Independent offers an overview of the controversy sparked by Spies: The Rise and Fall of KGB in America, which claims the legendary left/liberal journalist IF Stone was in cahoots with the Kremlin. (The authors of the book—one of whom is ex-KGB himself—also present their findings in the current issue of Commentary.) Eric Alterman, writing in the Daily Beast, says that it all depends on what the definition of a “spy” is: Stone helped the KGB identify potential recruits, but he didn’t pass along secret information. Alterman looks the word up in the dictionary and decides that Stone doesn’t qualify.

A Short Dictionary of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, the American-born author and “accidental chancellor” of Durham University, is selling a new edition of his Dictionary for Writers and Editors. (It’s actually called Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors: the author has named it for himself. An American might say that Bryson has named it after himself, but as the Daily Mail notes, the “after” would be improprer on the British Isles.) While the Daily Mail mulls Bryson’s dictionary, the Guardian examines a fictional Daily Mail Dictionary: Guardian readers are defined as “empty-headed leftie liberal morons who don’t understand anything“.

Meanwhile, as the Guardian celebrates the silver anniversary of its media section (and celebrates the fact that it was the only quality title in the UK to increase its sales numbers last month), the New Statesman facilitates a journalistic ménage à trois like none other. Evening Standard correspondent Gideon Spanier takes out a column in the Statesman and takes up Independent managing director Simon Kelner’s charge that the Guardian uses its media section “purposely to damage their biggest commercial rival”. (The Guardian has spread speculation that the cash-strapped Indie is trying to sell itself to the Daily Mail and General Trust.) Guardian exec Emily Bell admires the Indie MD for having “the balls to be very explicit” (though as Bell knows well, media execs do not need male gonads in order to be very explicit).

A Recipe for Failure. There are two days left in the London Times‘ “Recipe Exchange“: Gordon Ramsay will pick the five best entries next week. One early entrant is historian and all-around public intellectual Simon Schama, who contributes a cheese soufflé. The Wall Street Journal takes no position on Schama’s gruyère-parmesan mixture but says that Schama’s new book, America’s Future, “is to be savored“. But the NYT‘s David Brooks says that Schama has cooked up a “gopping goo of pure pretension“. According to Brooks, Schama’s attempt at reportage is—like a soufflé gone awry—thin. Instead of getting down and dirty with the nitty gritty of modern American life, Schama ensconces himself in “the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books“.

Dispatches From The Realm of Enlightened High Thinking That Exists Where The New York Review of Books Reaches Out and Air-Kisses The London Review of Books. In the NYRB, Hussein Agha (of St. Antony’s College) and Robert Malley (formerly of the Clinton administration) call for a “new language” to address Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the two-state solution may be wise, but the phrase “two-state solution” is tainted…Gary Willis looks at Lincoln’s efforts to give new meaning to the language of the Declaration. Willis concludes that Lincoln misinterpreted Jefferson, but that’s not such a bad thing after all: “Thank you, Mr. Lincoln, for doing us the favor of fruitfully being wrong

Colm Tóibín traces the fortunes of the two James brothers who followed Lincoln’s call to arms (Wilkie and Bob) and the two who did not (William and Henry). The two Alices—the spinster sister as well as William’s wife—figure prominently as well…Across the pond at the LRB, John Lanchester traces the fortunes of the Royal Bank of Scotland…RBS banknotes, he helpfully points out, are not legal tender in England and Wales…Wales (Jimmy) is the subject of the LRB‘s other lead article this week: the Wikipedia founder who once said that “the real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks” is himself a partisan of Ayn Rand, the philosopher-cum-novelist noted for her hostility toward philanthropy. According to LRB reviewer David Runciman (and according to Wales’s own Wikipedia page), Wales takes Rand’s objectivist philosophy quite seriously:

His first wife, Pam, was quoted in a September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales, because he believed altruism was evil, discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree when they were married.

Hot-Selling Classics, and Hot-Selling Clerics. Although Ayn Rand sales are surging (The Economist attributes the spike to the recession), the Boston Globe notes that even amid Rand-a-mania, last week’s Simpsons episode—which followed the plot line of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (and which featured Jodie Foster as Maggie)—was “the least watched in Simpsons history” …And while Atlas Shrugged flies off the bookshelves in the US, a book titled Sex As You Don’t Know It is flying off the bookshelves in Poland. That might not be so surprising…except for the fact that the author has taken a vow of celibacy. (He is a Catholic priest.)

Meanwhile, The Sun summarises a new book that condenses the classics into 140-character tweets. Atlas Shrugged doesn’t make the cut (even though an online poll by Random House rated it the best novel of all time), but Ulysses (which a Random House survey of experts rated as the best novel of all time) does. The Twitter version: “Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.”

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“You spread our Free Range Duck/Breasts with your trade-mark mix/Of honey, soya, Chinese Five Spice/While I etch/A fingernail down your spine….” These words by Ruth Padel, the newly elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, lie at the centre of a controversy-in-verse: who, exactly, is spreading the Free Range Duck Breasts? According to the Times of London, it is “common knowledge” in the poetry world that Independent columnist John Walsh is the maker of the “trade-mark mix”. The Evening Standard also identifies Walsh as the devilish lover in fake Armani who appears in Padel’s The Soho Leopard. That’s the same John Walsh whose 28 April column dredged up charges that Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate who faced off against Padel for the poetry professorship, was an “academic sexual predator”. Walsh acknowledges that Padel is an “old friend”; Padel says that she sees Walsh “once a year at parties“.

No evidence has emerged to suggest that Padel had a hand (or any other body part) in the anti-Walcott campaign—but the allegations against the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin hark back to a storied classical tradition: University of Newcastle classicist Peter Jones turns to Tacitus and finds that since the time of Tiberius, “gutter crawlers [have] gained estates and high office from their efforts”.

Rough Times for Rhodies. Padel’s post at Oxford is a “high office” (past occupants have included Seamus Heaney, Auden, and Matthew Arnold) but it is hardly a rich estate: it comes with a stingy stipend of £6,901 per annum (plus £40 for travel expenses). That said, at least the occupant has access to toilet paper—which is more than can be said for another prestigious Oxford honor (the Rhodes Scholarship) circa 1955. In that year, Rhodes scholar Reynolds Price discovered that his new home, Merton College, was TP-free. The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle review Price’s memoirs of his Oxford years, when the 22-year-old aspiring writer divided his time between traveling Europe and fending off the advances of the 47-year-old Stephen Spender. (Walcott would not be the first Oxford poetry don dogged by sexual harassment charges.)

Aside from these advances (all of which were rebuffed), Price still writes fondly of Spender. By the same token, Nicole Kelby, a former Walcott student who sued the Nobel laureate for sexual harassment in 1996, still writes fondly of her onetime teacher: in a Times of London essay, she calls him “the greatest living poet”. (In 2004, Slate.com agreed with that assessment.)

Rough Times for Romans. While Walcott blamed his Oxford opponents for “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard turns her attention to assassination of a more literal sort: a new book by TP Wiseman that choreographs Caesar’s final moments. Since these events occurred in the days before CSPAN televised the Senate, the historical record is marked by uncertainty, but one thing is for sure: “There must have been a lot of blood.” There must have been a lot of outrage as well; Wiseman shows that Caesar was widely popular; scholars who suggest otherwise are guilty of “conservative wishful thinking”.

Sarah Palin: Superhero? Speaking of “conservative wishful thinking”, Sarah Palin says that she is “excited to put [her] journalism degree to work”: the Alaska governor and failed US vice presidential candidate, who received a reporting degree from University of Idaho in 1987, has signed a book deal with HarperCollins. She won’t say what the deal is worth—although she insists that her writing won’t interfere with her governing (or her grandmothering).

While Palin tries to become a writer of a bestseller, Michelle Obama is already the subject of one: the Washington Post reports that Female Force—a comic book featuring the first lady as a superheroine—has sold out its first press run and is now on a second printing. But Palin isn’t jealous of the first lady’s magical powers: according to the Detroit News, Palin was the superhuman star of a previous Female Force instalment. Palin’s press run sold out too.

Blood Bath. Michelle Obama “is not a great beauty” but will “get better with age”, according to supermodel Iman, the wife of David Bowie. The New York Review of Books concludes that Madame de Staël (pronounced “style”) looked good at every age. The early 19th-century novelist’s network of correspondents included Byron, Gibbon, Goethe, Jefferson, and Talleyrand. We do not know how many of those intercourses were exclusively epistolary. But we do know that she got along poorly with Napoleon (whose own novel-writing attempts were less successful, as last week’s “Review of Reviews” duly noted). We also know that she would have been displeased to read Claire Harman’s new book Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (reviewed earlier this month in ORB by Jennifer Graham). Madame de Staël (who spent her life shuttling from capital to capital) looked down upon Austen (who spent her life shuttling from Basingstoke to Bath). De Staël went so far as to say that Austen was “vulgaire”.

Madame de Staël would not have been the only one displeased to read Harman. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of St. Ann’s College has accused her onetime student Harman of copying ideas that Sutherland set forth in a 2005 Oxford University Press book. Harman says that she gave credit where credit was due: “If [Sutherland] had read [Jane’s Fame], she would have found herself mentioned in the text, the notes, the bibliography, the acknowledgments, and the index.” Observers are hoping that these two “former friends” resolve their dispute more amicably than Colonel Brandon and John Willoughby.

One Little Peace. Speaking of amicable resolutions: Oprah Winfrey has buried the hatchet with the author of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey. In 2006, the talk show host hauled Frey in front of a national audience and forced him to admit that his ostensibly autobiographical book was a lie. Now, Vanity Fair reports that Winfrey has spoken with Frey on the telephone and offered a personal apology.