The Arkansas Testament
Despite its title, this is another evocation of Walcott's St. Lucia, a Caribbean paradise of whelk-gatherers, sea grapes, and sugar cane where the poet reads "silvery nouns" and deciphers "scriptures of sand." Walcott is again the consummate phrasemaker, describing a night "with white rum on its breath" and a moon "with a birthmark like Gorbachev's head." He includes a sequence of poignant love poems and concludes with the title poem, a painful examination of the visiting black poet's role in an Arkansas where he "was still nothing." In language that is unfailingly fresh and inventive, Walcott reminds us in every poem that a largely unexperienced world exists just "outside the door." Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.