Selected Poetry:
(Derek Walcott)
I have been reading Nobel winners from the year dot to the present day. I had just finished
Orhan Pamuks Literary publications and it was announced on the radio that he had won
this year's Nobel Prize for Literature : he is Turkish and loves to write about his home
city of Istanbul a place I enjoy writing about as well, even though I am not native to its
environs.
This writer - Derek Walcott Nobel Prize Winner for Literature - was introduced in Ireland about 10 years ago. I had been fussing about
my Dramatic background being totally Shakespearian so an academic pulled this
anthology out of his back pocket and we started reading and chatting about these
poems.
Derek Walcott is from the West Indies and he was brought up in the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia.
I flicked through the pages and read: "Mass Man" ... It was the title that drew my immediate
attention ... The first line "through a lion's head clouded by mange" is a wonderfully
evocative image and ensures that the reader is engaged at the starting point ... continuing
with the words "What metaphors" is absolute magic as it creates a view of the
poetic metaphor as a cosmic image that transcends a mere cliche ... I prefer to
see metaphorical context as dynamic and colossal, and find the use of "cliche" a bore
as it is better applied to films or cinematographic representations, but this poet
includes metaphors as "a child rigged like a bat, collapses sobbing"
The emotional flow of these poems grabbed my imagination,and I found another one that attracted my interest
"The Walk" ...
taking us through images and vocabulary that is rich and piquant "fidelity, O heart, O rose or iron"
Funny how in those days over 10 years ago fidelity was a word that was valued and cherished,
and the final line in last stanza,
"your house, a lion rising, paws you back"
gave me that secure comfortable feeling of owning my own house in the country ... and hating
awful rented rooms or state owned flats preferring the idyllic feeling of permanent living.
I feel I belong to a time when ownership was the way we existed ... and find today's
state control rather gray and limited.
Excellent reading ... Excellent poems ... keep on reading ...
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