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| Such moments revivify nostalgia in the original, classical Greek sense: nostos (return) plus algos (pain). For years Walcott has divided his calendar equally between Boston, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University, and a residence in Trinidad, a base for his frequent travels elsewhere in the Caribbean. This regular shuttling between two worlds has kept his poetry balanced between heartless skill and artless passion. The speakers of Walcott's poems are half strangers wherever they find themselves, not because they want to be but because they have no choice. In The Lighthouse, an island vendor approaches the poet and smiles: "Fifty? Then/ you love home harder than youth!"
This is a specific statement about a concrete emotion -- Walcott rarely generalizes or resorts to abstractions -- and yet it echoes well beyond its given point of utterance. At their most intense, Walcott's 10 volumes of poetry convey all the strangeness and exotica of island life -- of poor, forgotten people surrounded by water on a margin of the earth -- and make the whole spectacle as familiar as the view across the street.
It is misguided to praise poets for their subjects. Many of them, like Walcott, had little choice in the matter. What poets do with their inheritances means everything. And Walcott's language has evolved from his early, rather stilted imitations of English poets into an instrument of marvelous flexibility: capable of grand, sweeping imagery but also of harsh interruptions and interjections, slang, pidgin and Creole patois and subtle Caribbean syncopations. The combined effect is a verbal radiance, of scenes illuminated by "a moon so bright / you can read palms by it."