Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be close enough to feel the fire that these men lit in the world.
Derek Walcott, or rather his poetry, entered my life at the age of twenty and I was seventeen. I had read poems in the English Classics on my parents’ bookshelves earlier in my life. And a wonderful teacher, John Hodge at the Royal Queen’s College in Trinidad, introduced me outside the curriculum specific to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which had flashed like a torch in my mind. But this was the first time I knew immediately and deeply that great poetry could be written by one of my own West Indies. Somehow, I think it’s from the Public Library but maybe it’s also from John Hodge’s hands, I had come across the very fine booklet Twenty-Five Poems by Derek Walcott, his first book. I remember taking him with me to the savannah grounds of Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (now UWI St. Augustine campus) where I used to go running and coaching for tennis tournaments. And after a run I sat down on the stone stairs leading into the main College building and read this little book and its poems were a revelation that has lasted all my life.