Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world.
Derek Walcott, or rather his poetry, entered my life when he was twenty and I was seventeen. I had read poems in the English Classics on my parents’ bookshelves earlier in my life. And a great teacher, John Hodge at Queens Royal College in Trinidad, had introduced me outside the set curriculum to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which had flared like a torch in my mind. But this was the first time I knew immediately and deep down that great poetry could be written by one of my own West Indians. Somehow, I think it was from the Public Library but it may also have been from the hands of John Hodge, I had come upon the very slim booklet Twenty-Five Poems by Derek Walcott, his first book. I remember taking it with me to the savannah grounds of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (now the UWI St. Augustine campus) where I used to go to run and train for tennis tournaments. And after a run I sat down on the stone steps leading into the main College building and read this small book and its poems were a revelation which has lasted throughout my life.