RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

this luxury, to see nature as denuded of humanity?‖ (Handley 6). Walcott‘s and Snyder‘s
self-reflexive works are exemplary answers to Handley‘s prescription to integrate the
mythic and historic wilderness. Handley argues in New World Poetics that like Gary
Snyder, Walcott ―recycle[s] an ancient human memory of our belonging in the natural
world‖ by seeing the region‘s beauty and mystery despite its traces of colonialism and
slavery (9). Turtle Island and Omeros do not elide a tough and alienating history; they
draw their energy from a bitter past to build a bioregional culture of possibility. The
ancient Anasazi cliff dwellers whom Snyder invokes in the first poem of Turtle Island
exemplify a lost way of life, like that of the equally ancient Arawaks. The flocks of
camera-wielding tourists and derisive waiters in bow-ties impel Achille to search for a
pristine island, but like Snyder‘s early-rising log truck drivers hauling up the ―Tyler Road
grade / to the logging on Poorman creek‖ they remain in their inherited places because
―there is no other life‖ (Turtle Island ―Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students
of Zen‖ 63). Both poets employ the potential resentment against the modern forces that
marginalize ancient and primitive lifestyles as motivation to work pragmatically with
what has been left for the long-term ecological health of their chosen places. Their poetry
initiates a search for ways to work alongside the tourists and loggers for the long-term
benefit of the wild.
Derek Walcott and Gary Snyder effectively argue against attempts to extricate a
European Old World from a peoples‘ history of the New. Revolutionaries may hope for
the erasure of patrician history, but this is a ―filial impulse‖ that only perpetuates the
tradition it fights (Walcott, ―Muse‖ 36). Confounded by the scarcity of ―alter/native‖
ways to image the region, the English-educated and Barbados-born poet, Edward
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