Books: The Prodigal by Derek Walcott

Versed in the world

By John Ziebell

Writers who win the Nobel Prize for literature these days are usually in their dotage, their best years and best works almost always behind them. And that's not getting into the politics of the committee decisions, which have come to patently privilege demographics and ethnicity over more aesthetic concerns; straight-faced pundits actually discuss the award in terms of which continent, rather than what literary works, deserve the greatest consideration.

Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was certainly the first Nobel laureate from the island of St. Lucia when he won the prize in 1992, but he's also a brilliant poet and playwright and, above all, not the kind who would use the prize money to coast along in semi-retirement. Over the next decade Walcott published The Bounty, Tiepolo's Hound (illustrated with his own paintings), the essay collection What the Twilight Says, and collaborated with Paul Simon on the Broadway musical The Capeman. His new book-length poem The Prodigal is a provocative work from an artist still operating at the peak of his faculties.

Walcott is not a poet who makes the uninitiated reach immediately for the remote control. That's not to say his work is simplistic; this is a guy who wrote a more than 300-page epic modeled on Homer. But his ambiguities lie in abstraction and analogies, his narrative style is accessible, and in terms of the images that his poems are built upon, few writers are as visually and sensually persuasive. Anything Walcott describes, from a cathedral to a mangrove stump, is so perfectly detailed that it rises right off the page; we see elements take shape, smell them, almost know their weights and textures. Given a long enough sentence--and he does love a long sentence--Walcott can build and sustain an image that appeals to every sense we recognize and some that we may not.

The Prodigal is more a poetic meditation, or perhaps a lyric memoir, than a poem. It's also a travel narrative, moving from majestic Old World Europe through volatile Latin America to the island of the poet's birth. Walcott sees himself as an exile; like any exile, he exists between two worlds, and like any exiled writer, between two responsibilities. What's central to the book is the notion of living with contradictions. Walcott's Europe is about art rather than empire and offers no real indictment of its colonialist past, but it's also clear the author is no native son; the exile's curse is an inability to escape the pull of his personal history, and even the sophisticated Walcott is somehow incomplete outside St Lucia.

Still, he's a splendid geographical resource. Northern Europe might be cold and hierarchical, but has its own beauty. Italy's rich aesthetic traditions, in Walcott's minimal though eloquent take, spring organically from its sky and sea and soil. Walcott is truly at home with the natural world; the island of his birth provides his most profoundly personal descriptions, but he's no less artful with the Old World--"Between the sighs of leaves shone the bones of birches"--or when extending a metaphor to compare old men meeting for lunch in a Lausanne restaurant with Rembrandt's "Syndics of the Draper's Guild." Even the view of the river from the author's Manhattan apartment has poignant physical allure.

Walcott is a true literary cosmopolitan, his work rich with references to classical art, music, architecture and philosophy, but it is returning to the island that solidifies memory and makes him complete. There's a dark side to this kind of circularity, however, a strong feeling of consolidation and even conciliation from an artist who is feeling his age and unashamed to admit it, going so far as to call this work "what will be your last book." Hopefully Walcott's closure will mark only a hiatus, a lull on the island where the author finds pause and his resonant poem comes gracefully to rest, both at peace with themselves.