DEREK WALCOTT POETRY

Many of Walcott’s poems are extremely concerned not only with nature, but with the difficulty of describing nature as a poet. “Map of a New World” and “Becune Point” are explicitly about this problem. In both poems, it is difficult to live an authentic relationship with the land as a colonized person, because the land is always bringing up memories of violence. Nevertheless, it is essential to push past that violence in order to see the beauty of the natural landscape. Rather than just returning to the physical island, it is important to rediscover a way of seeing and being on the island that observes the land for how it is, rather than focusing on the associations it brings up.