Julian Lucas

The Enthusiast: Derek Walcott

“Under the Spell of a Poet’s Work,”  The New York Times Book Review, April 24, 2017:
Begin with this window-seat epiphany from the poet in flight, sky liner notes rivaled only by James Merrill’s “A Downward Look” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Night City.” Walcott approaches Trinidad in a plane recast as a pond’s gliding insect: “The jet like a silverfish bores through volumes of cloud.” From this altitude, all his major themes appear in dioramic miniature: the Odyssean homecoming, this contiguity between language and landscape (“sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets”), and the Caribbean’s existence beyond official histories. Landing is loveliest — each successive layer of the rematerializing world yields a “shelving sense of home.”