There are so many islands!I have read this part (called "After the Storm") of Walcott's immense "The Schooner Flight" many, many times, and this image astounds me. The whole poem kills me. I often wonder if I'm right when I say that there cannot be poetry without imagery. I think there can be good writing without imagery, but poetry... .
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit...
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He doesn't say it, but I can hear the bell-like, Christmassy sound the stars make when their branch is shaken. And I can see the magic powder falling from them. His image is that powerful to me that it leads me down other paths that may be different from paths taken by other readers, by you. I have enjoyed imagery in poetry ever since Spender surprised me with
...the watching of cripples passI still enjoy imagery like crazy. I strive in my poems to reproduce images that I harbour in my head, things that I've seen and lived, or can just imagine well enough to make them mine, therefore believable. That's some hard thing, and that's why when it's well done, it kills me. Recently I've been enjoying Opal Palmer Adisa's "Pan-Africanism" where the poet says "history is grafted / in our fingertips // we shine / the same sweat / all over / the diaspora ;" Geoffrey Philp's "Confession" where he says
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist...
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The old man cameSmell it? Feel the moisture in the air? Hear that subtle barrel/mackerel song? For imagery isn't only visual, but extends across the five senses, and may even make use of the sixth one; Rustum Kozain when in his wonderful poem "Stars of Stone" he says
into my grandfather's shop, and I ignored him
when he sat on the barrels of mackerel,
the air heavy with cheese and salt.
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Today the stones I know will nickuses an image whose strength lies not only in visualising the horrible act that went on that day, but also in hearing the stones in the K-K-K sound of nick/skulls/knock. It's the stones meeting their target.
our skulls, then knock our souls
from us. It is so.
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In "I want to write," Margaret Walker talks of her people, and of how she wants to write their songs, and hear them sing in the dark from their "sob-torn throats." Then toward the end of the poem she goes
I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl;
fling dark hands to a darker sky
and fill them full of stars
then crush and mix such lights till they become
a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.
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| Sir Stephen Spender |
