Finding A Voice

I'm still slow on the uptake when it comes to plundering the Web for its treasures. It only occurred to me today that it might be a good wheeze to see whether there was anything related to Walcott's mighty Omeros on Youtube, and boy was I glad I did. A full reading by the man himself of Book 1 of the epic was the main goody related to Omeros itself, but there was a fair amount of excellent material on other poems and the poet and his background. This included quite an early South Bank Show (at least that's what I think it is, with Mr Bragg looking very fresh, very spry) which I'm fairly sure I watched when it was first broadcast. I suspect this may have put DW on the poetic map for me since I'm pretty sure I never got to encounter anything by him, or indeed of him, at school or university. There's a mention at the beginning of the documentary that Walcott was little known in the UK at that point - a lack that now seems quite extraordinary.

The poet's own reading of Book 1 has wonderfully alerted me to the fact that I was hearing it, and thus the poem as a whole, wrong in my head. Whilst I knew what DW sounded like in interview, and had some sense of the Caribbean accent fundamental to the poem, I was failing to appreciate just how incantatory the underlying rhythms were intended to be. There was something more urgent, more pressing somehow in my mind. But having not just heard but been spellbound by DW's mastery I don't think I'll ever be able to hear anything by him again in any other way. This reminds me of getting similarly intoxicated with Seamus Heaney's voice, and, I suppose, in earlier times with Ted Hughes's.

I suppose this is part of the greatness of these guys. The metaphor of a writer finding a voice is literal with them. They don't so much find it in their work as manifest something that was there all along. And in each of them that voice is intimately tied to a sense of locality, though they effortlessly transcend all that's narrow and parochial.