668
PARTISAN REVIEW
way of the rethinking
The Radical Renewal
so often exhorts and so rarely
exemplifies.
FRED SIEGEL
ON DEREK WALCOTT
THE ARKANSAS TESTAMENT. By
Derek Walcott.
Farrar Straus
&
Giroux.$15.95.
Derek Walcott's eighth book of poems,
The Arkansas Testament,
marks a striking change in its author's sensibility. It is a stern, even a stark
book, marked by renunciations both in its manner and in its matter, intending
in its austerity to brush aside, half in impatience and half in penitence, much of
what has distinguished Walcott's earlier poetry, and to put in its place that
remorseless clarity with which it holds all things, even its own renunciations,
to account.
The book opens with several poems in short-lined quatrains whose
terseness is a kind of abnegation, as if the poet wished to refine his way to
truth by what he can't help seeing as a sacrifice. These poems are also writ–
ten in a plainer and more restrained idiom than Walcott has generally em–
ployed. He remains learned, mature, and subtle, but he does not concern
himself with the breadth of his linguistic range here, neither employing the
rich but hermetic high style of "The Castaway" nor the muscular integrity of
his dialect poetry.
From his early "Prelude" down to the poems of
Midsummer (1984),
Walcott has inhabited the question of what it is to introduce a land into a
written and cosmopolitan poetic culture. To do this is to place the poet in a
peculiar position-for such a poet must always speak for a people, yet the act
of doing so always threatens to destroy the authenticity of that poet's
connection to his or her vitalizing culture. A poet's cultural roots are always
vulnerable, especially when that culture is an oppressed one and when the
poetry is addressed to an audience that includes in some measure its oppres–
sor. But there is also another and deeper risk in the act of attempting to bring
into poetry national experiences which have not been subjects for poetry (at
least for cosmopolitan poetry), a risk which inheres not in the poet's particular
political situation, but in the very act of naming and stabilizing the unnamed
