Ian McMillan: Wowed by Walcott

Recently we lost a wordsmith I first encountered when I was a youth (literally: I went to a youth club with other youths) and whose work has stayed with me ever since. Derek Walcott was a poet from St Lucia who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 and whose work was really an epic reimagining, from a Caribbean perspective, of what poetry could be within a non-European tradition. If that previous sentence makes his work sound heavy, I didn’t want it to: Walcott’s writing is bright and airy and full of rhythm and legend and noise. The first book of his I read was The Castaway and Other Poems, which was published in 1965 and I must have read it in 1969 for a reason I’ll come to shortly. I was at Wath Grammar School and I would have been in the Third Form, or what these days is called Year 9.

Me and my mates were rebels because it was the late 1960s and there was rebellion in the air and so we would sneak out of school at dinnertime through a hole in the hedge that had been worn wider through the years; we would go down into Wath and because we were good studious grammar school boys our form of rebellion was to go to the library to sit and read. Sometimes we would reach into our blazer pockets and retrieve a clandestine mint and suck it quietly. Man the barricades! The other lads would go over to the magazine tables and peruse New Society or The New Statesman or The Listener or The NME and I would go to the tiny poetry section and read poetry books. I can remember only one other book apart from the Derek Walcott, and that was The Warlock of Love by Marc Bolan from T Rex. This was published in 1969 so that pins down the year because I remember the book was shiny and new but even so it had already been borrowed many times, presumably so that people could read immortal lines like “His cloak of caution, threadbare and patterned, fell to the moorland mire like a lamented autumn leaf.”

I discarded the Bolan and grabbed the Walcott; I think I was the only person who ever borrowed it. The poems were seductive and vivid, as in this description of a fish: “…the scales/age like a corselet of coins/a net of tarnished silver joins/the back’s sea-deep blue to the tail’s/wedged tapering Y.”

RIP Derek Walcott: do seek out his work and be delighted.