Poetry of the beach

Derek Walcott announced his domain in the first line of his first major collection, "In a Green Night," in 1962. "I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch / variegated fists of clouds that gather over / the uncouth features of this, my prone island," he said at the start of "Prelude."

For 45 years since, the voice of the Caribbean has led readers across the beaches of his native St. Lucia, along the byways of Trinidad and into the hills of Santa Cruz. From Brooklyn and Arkansas to London and Rome, fans have followed this Nobel Laureate and fortunate traveler -- to borrow the apt title of a 1982 collection -- wherever exile and memory led.

A new anthology, "Selected Poems" (Faber and Faber, 2007), surveys Walcott's literary terrain as mapped by Edward Baugh, the Jamaican poet and scholar. Experts can sniff at choices and omissions necessitated by 269 pages. (How can you pare down Walcott's epic "Omeros"?) But we lay readers can embrace this handy sampler as a companion on beaches and vacation byways of our own.

Can you see the rust-crusted gate of an island churchyard, the bent man mending fishnets at noon? Can you feel the caution in a lizard's pause, the space between a pelican and its shadow? Walcott can, and he fills collections from 1965's "The Castaway" to 2005's "The Prodigal" with moments that ask us to see and remember.

"By noon, / this further shore of Africa is strewn / with the forked limbs of girls toasting their flesh / in scarves, sunglasses, Pompeian bikinis," he observes in the first of those books. In the last, he is still on the water, "on the bright rim of the world," chasing dolphins and angels toward "that line of light that shines from the other shore."

Southern readers might also want a copy of 1987's "The Arkansas Testament," which finds Walcott crash-landed in a cheap motel on U.S. 71, mulling our heritage. "Over Fayetteville, Arkansas, / a slope of memorial pines / guards the stone slabs of forces / fallen for the Confederacy," he begins the title poem. "The young stones, flat on their backs, / their beards curling like mosses, / have no names...."

Summertime readers also should seek 1997's "The Bounty," a poignant elegy that grew from Walcott's return to St. Lucia after his mother's death. "When the violin whines its question and the banjo answers, / my pain increases in stabs," he writes in "Homecoming," only excerpted in the new collection.

All the hallmarks of mature Walcott are in play: the long-breathed lines, operatic in their demand to be read without a break; the insistent rhythm of a friend of music; the watercolorist's eye; the tug of memory.

"This is when a powerful smell of baked bread drifts and when the hum / of mosquitoes becomes tangible," he says of day turning to dusk, "when the road-ruts / deepen and faces that I love harder every year turn / towards the dusk and deepen also under the coconuts. / It is indigo now, and the sea will continue to burn / until the last plane crosses with its green and red / wing-lights headed north and it is now definitely / night and the stars come where they were ordered / to protract the idea of patterns to infinity / and the sand exhales and there on the edge of the sea / green and red lights droning where stars and fireflies breed."

Maybe the sand will exhale for you, too. If you'll take these poems along this summer, you'll love them harder every year.

(Dean C. Smith, a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-CH, is celebrating 20 years as a Walcott reader.)