I OWE DEREK. He told me I was a poet and I knew I could believe him because nobody who knew him can truthfully say they ever heard him pay a false compliment to an aspiring writer.
In fact, the opposite was true: his standards were so exacting and his critiques so uncompromising, and he set the bar for poetry so high, that everyone coming after him will have to do – as old time Jamaicans say — ‘their endeavour best’. He was the best.
He was a poet-playwright who lived for poetry, and he was born into a community that seemed to have been waiting for his coming, because his gifts were whole-heartedly embraced by St Lucians from the time he first published his verse as a schoolboy. He reciprocated by writing his people into literature. He never tired of praising St Lucia, the Helen of the Caribbean, and because he was proud of being a Caribbean man he exalted and lamented all things Caribbean: our wretched history, our perplexing present, our abiding beauty.
Derek was all about beauty. The entire body of his work can be read as a deep and wide engagement with beauty in all its manifestations.
He made ordinary St Lucian fishermen the subject of great myths.
He gave a simple Black woman sitting on a bus in Castries earrings of good gold – he stipulated that it had to be good gold – and likened her to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. He called her Beauty, and he declared that Beauty is the light of the world.
And Derek’s poems are a constant source of enlightenment, wonder and delight. No modern poet ever handled the English language with more authority, skill and mastery, but he was also a very playful poet and I often engage in a game with myself in which I try to spot some of the many joyful little ‘signatures’ with which he marked his work.
I like his deft deployment of citrus fruit like lemons and tangerines to stimulate the sight, smell, touch and taste senses of the reader. I treasure his outrageous puns: a figment of the imagination, the banana of the mind – people from the eastern Caribbean call bananas ‘figs’. My husband, Ted Chamberlin, who brokered the deal that got Derek’s papers for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and who drove said papers from Boston to Toronto for twelve straight hours with only brief stops for fear one draft of a poem be lost, always says that his favourite pun in all of English literature is ‘An adamant Eve’. I admire Derek’s bad jokes. O, how we will miss his outrageous loud-laugh jokes, but when the phrase ‘the light of the world’ comes up in his poems as a quotation, as a title, in English or in Latin, ‘lux mundi’, I always feel as if he wants me to bow my head in prayer.
If I’d seen him one more time, I’d intended to ask him if he thought that by writing so much about the light of the world he was doing his part in keeping encroaching darkness at bay, but I know he’d never answer a question like that, he’d expect me to figure it out for myself, and to do my part in keeping the light project going.
He was my friend. He was famously difficult; but he could also be amazingly considerate and sensitive. He was blessed with the love and devotion of extraordinary women like Margaret, and for the last half of his life the amazing Sigrid. He loved family. Anyone who ever saw him in the company of his children, Peter, Anna and Lizzie, and grandchildren could see that he held them close with a fierce and all-protecting ‘hoops of steel’ love.
He gave me my first creative writing lesson, and to this day I tend to look at some poems, if not through his eyes, with the awareness that he might be looking over my shoulder. I already miss him. In the over fifty years that I knew him, he gave me some of the best advice anyone has ever given me about poetry, and about life. He once insisted that I go with him and Sigrid to a gathering in Atlanta to meet Josef Brodsky. He introduced me to the great Russian by saying, ‘Josef meet Lorna. She’s a poet.’ I still feel obliged to try to live up to that introduction. I miss him already. I will always miss him.