HYMNS FOR THE INDIGO HOUR

By Pico Iyer

Even readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands. If the multiculturalists who govern the academy were worthy of a gospel, they would need to look no further.

The Bounty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 78 pages; $18), Walcott's first collection of poems since he won the Nobel in 1992, finds the 67-year-old wanderer sitting on the veranda in the last indigo hour of the day, "watching the hills die" and imagining a world where he will exist no more. All the master's gifts are prodigally displayed here: an ear that finds liquid music in "fast water quarrelling over clear stones," a wit that sees death--the state of wordlessness--as "beyond declension," and an attentiveness that not only observes squirrels "spring up like questions" but also, 20 pages later, amplifies and complicates the image as "squirrels abound and repeat themselves like questions."

Images keep recurring, crisscrossing, gaining new associations in verses that have the noble radiance of stained glass, grave but full of light. In his twilight hours, the poet often berates himself for not having hymned the "unrelenting mercy of light" and the "shallows' scriptures" of his native St. Lucia as he should. In the end, however, he realizes that what has sustained him all along are the "immortelle" and "wild mammy-apple" of his "generous Eden." As the waves of his melodious argument wash up at last on the shores of thanksgiving and affirmation, one realizes that there is no more serious, or more sonorous, writer living.

--By Pico Iyer