‘No Man Ever Dies in His Own Country’ THE ARKANSAS TESTAMENT<i> by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $14.95; 117 pp.) </i>

Last year, Derek Walcott’s “Collected Poems” appeared in a 500-page volume. It seemed to me then, and his new collection of verse confirms my feelings, that it may have been a somewhat premature assembling of the poet’s canon. “The Arkansas Testament” not only finds Walcott examining some of his old themes, but doing so with youthful invention.

Born in 1930 on the small Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Walcott now divides his time between Boston and Trinidad. He is part of the poetic gang of four (Josef Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney being the other three), the internationally displaced poets who teach in America.

His poetry draws on an awareness of the lack of any viable West Indian literary tradition or consensus of culture. He emerged from an often intellectually restricted environment and managed to master the vocabulary of the English language and to explore the rhythms of syntax, the power of metaphor and the intellectual game-playing of allusion. But the problem of a West Indian writer working in a tradition tied to British imperialism has always been present in Walcott’s mind.

The riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips

You could trace to the Sonnets or the Moor’s eclipse

(“Midsummer” 1984)

Walcott’s seven previous collections have been steeped in an ambivalence toward the outside world and its relationship to his own native land of St. Lucia. The clash of Europe and colony, language and landscape, the “old world” and the “new world” of the Americas; these have been his themes. That there are always choices to be made implies a rejection of something and an inevitable sense of loss. In “Midsummer,” one felt a growing awareness of mortality, which bestowed upon his poetic journey the qualities of a pilgrimage. The volume ended shrouded in overwhelming forfeiture.

. . . though no man ever dies in his own country

the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart

“The Arkansas Testament” is a collection of 39 poems divided into two parts--”Here,” referring to the author’s native Caribbean, and “Elsewhere.” The voice of the Caribbean half of the volume moves easily between the received European tradition and the local oral one. The author is able to employ both when necessary. This accounts in part for Walcott’s distinctive tone, pitched somewhere between the rhetorical and the vernacular.

as I watch a low seagull race

its own cry, like a squeaking pin

from the postcard canoes of La Place,

where the dots I finished begin,

and a vendor smiles: ‘Fifty? Then

You love home harder than youth!’

Like the full moon in daylight, her thin,

uncontradictable truth.

The high point of “Here” is the poem “The Light of the World,” a sensitive and heart-rending account of a Saturday-night bus journey from the town marketplace back to a small house on a country beach where the speaker is staying. On this serene, moonlit evening, the speaker, having walked about the town he was born and grew up in, now “lusts” peacefully after two girls on the bus and falls in “love” with a third. Here is a perfect opportunity to feel in tune with his past. But no, thoughts of discord disturb the tranquility of his communion with his people. The truth is painful, ever-present, and reduces the speaker to tears.

I, who could never solidify my shadow

to be one of their shadows, had left them their earth,

their white rum quarrels, and their coal bags,

their hatred of corporals, of all authority.

The moment when he should belong is the very moment he is most acutely aware of the fact that he no longer does.

In “Elsewhere,” Walcott, the poet who did not want to leave home but at the same time needed to aspirate his mind, addresses the West. He pays homage to a past master, in a eulogy addressed to W. H. Auden.

It was such dispossession

that made possession joy,

when, strict as Psalm or Lesson,

I learnt your poetry.

He dedicates the title poem “Elsewhere” to another “master,” Stephen Spender. But with each poem, it becomes more clear to what degree Walcott remains a West Indian, with Europe or America claiming attention only inasmuch as they cast light back upon his central dilemma. He is able to write:

I remember the cities I have never seen

exactly. Silver-veined Venice, Leningrad

with its toffee-twisted minarets. Paris . . .

A man of Walcott’s classical education and intellect is sensitive to the power of these centers of international culture, but one senses of Walcott that he has come to understand that (as Seamus Heaney, to whom this volume is dedicated, once wrote) the provincial state of mind, which needs the affirmation and approval of the metropolis, is not as important as the parochial imagination, which has no doubt about “the artistic validity of its own parish.”

Therefore as we quarry on through “Elsewhere” with its formal invention, its classical allusions, its references to Cambodia, Chernobyl and Gorbachev, there is a suspicion that, although Walcott may be embracing cosmopolitan ideas and subjects, he does so with less emotional assurance than when he is barefoot and feeling sand trickling uneasily between his toes, and in the grip of the obsession that compels him to address the more essential questions of his origins and identity.

This is not to suggest that Walcott should confine himself to the Caribbean; far from it. “The Young Wife” is as painful and universal a poem about cancer as one is ever likely to read, and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II” depicts the urban squalor of Newark, N.J., with at least as much passion as the writing of its most famous literary inhabitant, Amiri Baraka.

Johannesburg is full of starlit Shebeens.

It is anti-American to make such connections.

The title poem of the volume, “The Arkansas Testament,” picks up where “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II” leaves off. It handles “the stripes and scars” of modern American racism with dignity and urgency. Walcott checks into a $17.50 motel in Arkansas. He wakes early, needing a 5 a.m. caffeine “fix,” and drives into the nearest town, Fayetteville.

I bagged the hot Styrofoam coffee

to the recently repealed law

that any black out after curfew

could be shot dead in Arkansas.

This is no protest poem. True, it concerns the history of the South; it concerns racism and the feelings of self-contempt that white ignorance often engenders in black people’s souls. But it is a poem about writing, about a man’s struggle to bare his soul and talent in an environment other than that which nurtured it. It is a poem about a particular type of black man; a West Indian writer, in America.

As another outstanding West Indian writer, C. L. R. James, once said, “it is when you are outside, but can take part as a member, that you see differently from the ways they see, and you are able to write independently.” Walcott “the outsider” is the supreme poet of the Caribbean, because he has rejected the easy labeling that might have enabled him to make a peace with himself. “The Arkansas Testament” is witness to his ongoing struggle. Having held at bay the anger brought forth by his treatment in Fayetteville, Walcott knows that

There are things that my craft cannot

wield, and one is power.

He refers here to the Southern power of “Lee’s slowly reversing sword,” not the moral power of which his work contains an abundance.