There is a common view that winning the Nobel Prize is a mixed blessing for a writer. It is one of the highest recognitions they can be accorded, but it all too often signals the end of the greatest period of creativity. Since winning the Nobel in 1992 Derek Walcott has gone on to produce four collections. His previous, The Prodigal, contained a morbid prophecy, with the author telling himself it might be “your last book”. Thankfully White Egrets, released in hardback last year and now available in paperback, has proved him wrong, and shows without doubt that Walcott has escaped the curse of the Nobel.

Written exclusively in a loose iambic pentameter line resembling at times late Shakespeare, White Egrets is a highly unified collection. The poems, many untitled, exhibit a similarity of form that makes them resemble short chapters in a verse novel: the longest of them are around 20 lines, the shortest around 10, there are no stanzas, and the rhyme scheme throughout is roughly an alternating ‘abab’, with Walcott willing to leave words unrhymed, or rhymed at some distance, if it suits him. Like a master musician, his mastery of the rules means he know exactly when to break them.

However, within this unity, Walcott is able to achieve the stated goal in part five of the title poem: “The perpetual ideal is astonishment.” His lines as ever move lyrically among his personal symbols: “the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove / as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar”. Devotees of Walcott will recognise the familiar St Lucian territory of the poet’s birth, “(blank, printless beaches are part of my trade)” he writes in a self-aware parenthesis, but viewed now through the prism of age and memory. There is still the customary energy and life that makes Walcott’s work so powerful: “My veins bud, I am so / full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.” but there is elegiac tone also to be heard. Walcott does not shy away from rhyming both verbally and thematically on the word closest to the name of the eponymous bird: regrets. The subject of age is unavoidable, and is deal with in a number of ways, from the comical, “What? You’re going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”, to the sombre, “If I fall into a grizzled stillness / sometimes … it is because of age / which I rarely admit to”, but it never becomes the dominant theme.

As ever with Walcott, the landscape is paramount. It is no surprise that as well as being a writer he is also a painter, for the exact visual description is one of his foremost abilities:

Those hillsides ridged with ramparts and bell towers,

the crests of olives, those wheat-harvested slopes

through glittering aspens, those meadows of sunflowers,

with luncheon napkins like the mitres of popes

White Egrets is a collection to be thankful for. Life-affirming even in its awareness of mortality, we must be grateful that age has done nothing to cloud Walcott’s poetic vision.

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