The Gulf

by Derek Walcott

Dust jacket design by Joseph Durante. His 8th book & 4th book of poetry & second published in America. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1969 where it won the Cholmondeley prize for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

111 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read a poet quite like Walcott. I read the poems in The Gulf in an afternoon. His language seems to live in contrasts and opposites. The poems can be lush, but jagged; shard-like yet floral; smooth yet tense.

I would recommend this book as a good way into his masterpiece Omeros. You can learn his language and get a feel for his writing and his themes. It's all here in The Gulf, mostly written in the 1960s. As with Wallace Stevens, I don't always understand the poem, but I like the colors and the language and the way he goes about things:

Thoughts fell from him like leaves.
He followed, that was all,
his mind, one step behind,
pacing the poem, going where it was going.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with Lowell, I think I appreciate Walcott more by reading the poems in their original contexts rather than in later collected editions.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.

One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. On fire,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
of earth,

that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.

All its indifference is a different rage

- Codicil, pg. 32-33

* * *

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint's. I wasn't too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn't Central Park.
I'm coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
on case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kcks,
that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid's mother shouting
like 'Jackie' or 'Terry,'
'now that's enough!'
It's nothing really.
They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it's so tough,
forget it.

- Blues, pg. 67-68

* * *

Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,
rigidly metred, early-rising rain
recounting, as its coolness numbs the marrow,
that I am nearing forty, nearer the weak
vision thickening to a frosted pane,
nearer the day when I may judge my work
by the bleak modesty of middle age
as a false dawn, fireless and average,
which would be just, because your life bled for
the household truth, the style past metaphor
that finds its parallel however wretched
in simple, shining lines, in pages stretched
plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a guttering
rainspout; glad for the sputter
of occasional insight,
you who foresaw
ambition as a searing meteor
will fumble a damp match and, smiling, settle
for the dry wheezing of a dented kettle,
for vision narrower than a louvre’s gap,
then, watching your leaves thin, recall how deep
prodigious cynicism plants its seed,
gauges our seasons by this year’s end rain
which, as greenhorns at school, we’d
call conventional for convectional;
or you will rise and set your lines to work
with sadder joy but steadier elation,
until the night when you can really sleep,
measuring how imagination
ebbs, conventional as any water clerk
who weighs the force of lightly falling rain,
which, as the new moon moves it, does its work
even when it seems to weep.

- Nearing Forty, pg. 106-107

[John Porten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walcott’s poetry (like most poetry, I suppose) works best when a seemingly unintelligible jumble of images crystalizes suddenly into a familiar scene or feeling. It helps to know, then, that Walcott wrote frequently about his time in the American Northeast, where he felt alienated by the weather and the culture and the whiteness, and often calls on images of snow to signal feelings of loneliness or isolation.

It also helps to know that Walcott grew up Methodist on a largely Catholic island, and his references to religion often invite the reader to feel a pent-up anxiety about belonging in one’s own home.

Most of all, it helps to know that Walcott struggled with his own writing in a European tradition as a betrayal of his anti-colonial instincts. His writing about poetry is often really about the colonization and abuse of St. Lucia, and his writing about St. Lucia is often really about his concern that European style has colonized his writing.

These insights helped me, but did not prevent me from foundering frequently in The Gulf. This is not beginner stuff. I felt most rewarded when I was able to find real criticism and analysis to guide me. When I could, I felt that I grew as a reader. When I couldn’t, I often felt that I couldn’t break through to Walcott’s meaning.

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Gulf shines, dull as lead. The coast of Texas
glints like a metal rim. I have no home
as long as summer bubbling to its head

boils for that day when in the Lord God’s name
the coals of fire are heaped upon the head
of all whose gospel is the whip and flame,

age after age, the uninstructing dead.”

[Nikita Ladd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poem in this book was the title poem. Lines from "The Corn Goddess," too, do the descriptive image such as only he knows how - "Silences asphalts the highway, our tires hiss / like serpents" and "At dusk the Presbyterian cattle-bell / collects lean, charcoal-brittle elders, / stalled in their vision of a second hell."

[Madeline W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I'm ready to get back to poetry now.

[anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

eh

[Ernest Mathijs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title poem, 'The River' and 'Guyana' are my favourites.