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Abstract
In Derek Walcott's "White Egrets" (2010) the titular birds play a central role in the conversation that the poet opens up with the ornithological artist John James Audubon. Audubon's work is the fruit of complex negotiations between life and death, humans and animals, real presences and emblems. Walcott's examination of these negotiations enables him to reconsider Audubon's poetics and ethics of representation whilst rearticulating his own. Walcott referred to poetry (and painting) as "Adam's task of giving things their names": a statement that might be taken to suggest an exploitative perspective and an anthropocentric approach which dismisses the need to treat nonhumans ethically. "White Egrets," instead, emphasizes interaction rather than prevarication, showing that "naming" the world can only be significant and regenerative if the "things" to be "named" play their part in the creative process rather than being sealed off from the human world in order to be reified and exploited.
Keywords
Walcott - Audubon - environmental imagination - animals - White Egrets
Derek Walcott's White Egrets, his latest collection of poems, has often been described by reviewers as a book preoccupied with aging and death. White Egrets does in fact contain many poems dedicated to late friends and public intellectuals such as the playwright August Wilson, the Barbadian journalist, diplomat and jurist Oliver Jackman, the Jamaican novelist and journalist John Hearne, the Martinican poet, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire; in a poem where he remembers the Caribbean actors Wilbert Holder, Claude Reid, and Ermine Wright, Walcott highlights the importance of making "a shrine" in his head for those he perceives to be vulnerable to the ravages of time: "quick, quick, before they all die" (71). Walcott also bravely faces his own mortality throughout the collection: in the sequence of eight poems entitled "White Egrets," which will be under scrutiny here, he contemplates his own "ending" "with the leisure of a leaf falling in the forest, / pale yellow spinning against green" (9) whilst looking at the beautiful Santa Cruz valley in Trinidad. The genii loci of "White Egrets" are the birds which give it its title and play a central role in the conversation that the poet opens up with John James Audubon, North America's iconic naturalist and ornithologist and the artist...