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.
After that I read all the books as they have come out. The last, White Egrets, I now have in my hands with poems as magnificent as any Derek, then past eighty, ever wrote. I cannot recall the titles of all the books, they flow into a blur of beauty, but they have been incomparably important in my life. I remember “A Letter from Brooklyn” from the early book In A Green Night, a poem which made me think at the time that a perfect piece of writing was possible. I think of the book-length poem Another Life which I believe is the single greatest poetic creation of the last century – and Professor Eddie Baugh’s annotated edition of that book the greatest work of scholarship in West Indian literary studies. And all the other Walcott books down through the years. So much to praise and cherish forever as long as forever ever lasts.
Over the years I met Derek many times, the last occasion being at Carifesta in 2009 when he and President Jagdeo had a memorable exchange of views about the value and place of writers and artists in a nation. I wish my friendship with Derek had been closer and our conversations longer. Perhaps my reverence for his work was too intense to permit the closer friendship which thrives on accepting frailties as much as on appreciating genius. But always there has been the poetry and myself forever caught in the web of its light and its beauty.
