Midsummer

At the heart of Midsummer, there is a concern with how language--especially for the Caribbean writer--is defined by migration and travel, region and landscape. Since leaving Trinidad in 1981 to reside in the United States, the St Lucian poet and Noble Prizewinner, Derek Walcott, has composed poems infused by metaphors of excursion and return, poems mapping in this, the "last third of his life"--the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the metropolitan North and the underdeveloped South. In this powerful sequence of poems, Walcott is wryly conscious of the vastly different planes of reality they occupy: the "colourful" profusion of one, against the exhausted, defeated rawness of the other. While the "imperial dream" still echoes in the West's "fury of pronunciation" against its enemies, Walcott despairs of any cosmopolitan solution to the cultural barrenness of these "opposing alphabets". If poetry is to count in this war against bigotry and racism then it must be "non-aligned", free to bear witness, to expose the legacies and fears joining the two hemispheres. In the eight-piece sequence on Cuba, called "Tropic Zone", that realisation, however, comes perilously close to being undermined as Walcott nostalgically evokes days of prerevolutionary "grace", while celebrating the transforming-engendering-power of "genius ... to contradict history". That said, in the concluding poem he moves beyond nostalgia to end on an optimistic note, celebrating the "disenfranchised sublime" of the world's wanderers, their ability to rise from defeat and their eternal journeying between "memory" and "understanding". --David Marriott