BOOKS
669
and unstable experiences which go into poetry and by means ofwhich a poet
hopes to be able to speak for a people.
Derek Walcott is a poet of the West Indies, but his book
The Arkansas
Testament
is about being a poet from the West Indies. It is this worry, this
problem of conflicting allegiances, which perhaps accounts for the book's pre–
vailing tone of stern clarity. While it is too much to say that Walcott's move
from richness to stern simplicity is a move north from an imaginative tropics
to an imaginative New England, it is clear that the simplicity of this book is
the simplicity of a poet striving to define certain losses resulting from that
move and that the thematic burden of this book is the poet's separation from
his native land and his early idiom.
The first section of the book is called "Here." There is a self-lacerating
quality about that title, since "here" is the poet's native St. Lucia, and the po–
ems, if they were not in fact written "elsewhere," are at least largely about
the poet's inability to see St. Lucia any longer as his "here." The return to a
vitalizing landscape to which the poet's relations have become vexed is one
of the traditional crises of poetry. Ever since "Tintern Abbey" the fear that
the poet has betrayed a place to which he or she has had a vital link (or that
the place has betrayed the poet) has been among the driving energies of po–
etry, as if poetry can be written only when all the signs argue that it is no
longer possible, as if the reality of that vital link, like Paradise, can be af–
firmed only once it has been lost.
The deepest and most powerful of the poems of return which make up
the first half of the book is "The Light of the World." Like the earlier and
more bitter "Homecoming: Anse La Raye" (1969), this is a poem about
encountering strangers, for it is in encountering strangers more than in en–
countering friends that one encounters one's native culture as a whole. The
earlier poem is stark: taunting himself with having imagined, like a grade–
hungry Afro-Greek, that he would return to his island as Odysseus returned
to Ithaca, he depicts himself surrounded by begging children who thought he
was a wealthy tourist. "The Light of the World," by contrast, is a poem of
tender regret which attests to that love which persists past alienation and
even betrayal.
The poem's closing scene is not a rapprochement, not a recovery, but it
does affirm about as much as anyone can affirm, that deep ties, no matter
how thoroughly compromised, remain ties after all:
Then, a few yards ahead , the van stopped. A man
shouted my name from the transport window.
I walked up towards him. He held out something.
