Review by Booklist Review
Twilight--that dramatic and melancholy transition--is the perfect trope for Nobel laureate Walcott, a West Indian born of forces as opposite as day and night--of light skin and dark, of conquerors and the enslaved, of the old and the new. The first set of essays in this collection of powerful meditations focuses on the confounding confluence of cultures found in the Caribbean. In the title essay, Walcott reveals how the conflict between his deep love of the English language and his anguish over the horrors and injustices of racism and colonialism made finding his voice as a poet and playwright excruciatingly difficult. "The truest writers are those who see language not as linguistic process but as a living element," he writes, and, indeed, he himself makes no distinction between life and literature, whether he's writing poetry or brilliant assessments of the work of his peers, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, V. S. Naipaul, and Les Murray. Walcott's vision is global, his candor electrifying, his piercing insights and oceanic eloquence transcendent. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In essays originally published between 1970 and 1997, Walcott, winner of a Nobel prize in 1992 for his poetry and plays (Omeros, The Bounty), engages with literature, politics and their intersection. This is Walcott's first prose collection but the writing here is so intense that it threatens to disintegrate into lyric; in fact, the pieces deserve to be read aloud for their finely wrought metaphors, their intelligent, conversational observations and the beauty of their sound. Brilliant insights come suddenly, even unexpectedly, as in the aside that "reading [Wallace] Stevens is like having Chocolate for breakfast." Most of the essays are considerations of a wide range of writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Joseph Brodsky and Ernest Hemingway. The remaining few, including the Nobel prize address, "The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory," are intense meditations on the state of West Indian writing and culture. A recurring concern is the relation of the postcolonial writer to the imperial language: Walcott, who now lives in both the United States and his native St. Lucia, describes "barbarian Bards" who "recite long passages of the imperial literature as if it were their own; and with a vigour, even a love, that brings a blush to the civilized cheek." But while he criticizes V.S. Naipaul for turning his back on the West Indies, and praises card-carrying anti-imperialists like C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire, Walcott is no hard-liner. He is indignant toward those who reject any aspect of the West Indian heritage, whether it be African, Asian, indigenous American or European, acting on his own contention that poetry must not dwell on the scars of history, but should instead embrace the beauty and the possibilities of the present. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A poet's (poetical) prose about poetry. Walcott's (The Bounty, etc.) humid rhetoric can overwhelm a subject, as when ""I try to divert my concentration from that mesmeric gritted oyster of sputum on the concrete floor."" And so, a reader wandering through the periodically flowery byways and orotund arabesques of these 14 essays may long, instead, at times, for a more plainspoken, adamantine critical voice--like that, say, of poet-critic Mary Karr. Yet entwined here with the tricky verbal vines and orchids are also insights of an unusual provenance. West Indian-born Walcott's views of current poetry and postcolonial culture are admirably independent and syncretic. He is able to take the measure of such stylistically distinct avatars as the relentlessly, redemptively flinty British poet Philip Larkin and American confessionalist Robert Lowell. Walcott spikes his intermittently languid reveries with comments that crackle: ""Modern American poetics is as full of its sidewalk hawkers as a modern American city: this is the only meter, this is the American way to breathe, this is the variable foot,"" he complains. That error isn't his. Rather, the 1992 Nobel laureate explores, in the emphatic plural, poetry's various islands, while diverging now and then to authors of prose. He claims Hemingway as""a West Indian writer"" and salutes the Trinidadian C.L.R. James for Beyond a Boundary, termed by Walcott ""a cricketer's Iliad."" Still, our critic's lens isn't flawless. As an apologist for Ted Hughes, Walcott proves laughably sentimental: ""Poets come to look like their poetry . . . Hughes's face emerges through the pane of paper in its weathered openness as both friendly and honest. It speaks trust."" Rather conspicuously in an era of major contemporary women poets, the book omits positive mention of women (save for Dickinson) as anything more than muselike pretty faces; they are simply not part of Walcott's poetic roll call. But so goes literary independence. An archaic male vanity makes some mistakes on the poetic prowl. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
