Walcott's long poem resonated with my wanderer. That is, he captures the pitched experience of a traveler, wanderer, through physical space and through time. This is a personal history, at times almost like a lament for a life lived apart from one's true "home." Or instead of home where one originates. When I come back to this poem I intend to look at Walcott's perspective on the wanderer versus native although the idea didn't strike me too hard until the end. The journey in "The Prodigal" is one worth taking.

Saint Lucia


This book-length poem in sections, most in blank verse (iambic pentameter or a foot or two more per line), ranges across countries, moods, and relationships to create a memoir/travelogue spanning time and continents. Walcott always turns a pretty phrase; here, I admire his use of repetition, which includes both phrases and images. These reiterations echo both the repetitions--with variations--of the landscapes, and foreground the reader's awareness of language. The poem itself seems to serve as an Ariadne's thread to guide the poet, and reader, back to Saint Lucia and the opportunity to come to terms with his own aging and mortality. ( )

I was disappointed in this "last" book (did I read somewhere that he claimed this would be his last poetry collection?) if anything for its self-indulgence. Just when I couldn't handle another scene of light likened to some painter, he parenthetically breaks in and makes fun of himself for his knack for making such a move:"the light / out of pearl, out of Pierro della Francesca / (you could tell he would mention a painter)"Of course he continues to do it, and such self-poking didn't save the poem for me but deepened my sense of the project as the whimsical musings of a major poet at the end of his life, his twin brother dead, his romances failed, his former lovers and friends dead. It felt as if he were spinning his wheels.And there was something about his acknowledgment that he missed the 20th century that struck a chord with me:"In the middle of the nineteenth centurysomewhere between Balzac and Lautreamont,a little farther on than Baudelaire Stationwhere bead-eyed Verlaine sat, my train broke down,and has been stuck there since. When I got offI found that I had missed the Twentieth Century."I'm coming at this from an odd angle, but his love for formal English prosody does continue through from the 19th century, almost as if he missed the Modernist revolution. I mean on one hand that sense of tradition, of writing back to the empire having mastered their language better than they speak it lends him great formal power, which I've always admired in his work as the rhyme schemes never seem forced or sing-songy thanks to the power of enjambment. And I never find the poems archaic; he is Modern, just look at the brilliant reinterpretation of Homer's work in Omeros. That sort of re-interpretation and re-presenting of our cultural inheritance in contemporary terms appeals to my imagination and makes me think of books like Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. But I think his sense of Art with a big A is definitely a Romantic notion, especially when he makes comments like this in an interview: "There is no history in art...the criticism of art is historical, but art itself does not contain history." Come again?His obsession with History vs. history has always intrigued me, and there's been a shift from addressing London and England as empire center to Paris and France in his last two books. It speaks to his mixed cultural legacy (St. Lucia, the Helen of the West Indies, exchanged hands between England and France again and again, so it makes sense he would write back to both). But where his preoccupation with England in his earlier work was to gain literary credibility, I find the shift to France an attempt to gain artistic credibility, especially with his identity as a painter. Just look at Tiepolo's Hound: it included 26 of his own paintings. I would have thought the Art history, painter, ekphrastic lover in me would have appreciated his musings on art in this book, but it's far from the investigative scrutiny and illuminating connections found in Tiepolo's Hound and operates on this level of exclusivity where if you know the style of the artist or painting in question you'll get his comparison and reference; if not, it has the power to distance the reader as it sounds like name-dropping and lofty elitism. I found it a cheap shortcut to really describe a scene in a fresh way.Maybe one of these days I'll return to that thesis I wrote on his work and flesh out some of those essay chapters. ( )