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

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negotiate the challenges of New World poetry by writing intensely self-reflexive works
that evoke the search for a healed sense of place.
Both poets critique a linear view of Western progress. The ―calendrically‖
marching time of the nation leads people in false consciousness towards a Hegelian idea
of freedom, while surreptitiously leading them away from a pastoral garden, alienating
them from a sense of natural belonging and a sense of home. The response of both
authors is to mend this false dichotomy between civilization and nature by subverting
linear history for a cyclical view of progress back to the past and the bones of a culture.
This poetic strategy is nothing new. Eliot‘s modern poet was an impersonal archeologist
of the ―present moment of the past,‖ but the mythic past, Eden or Tsimtsum, he chose to
look at was fundamentally Western and imperial (―Tradition and the Individual Talent‖).
The ambivalent subject of history is not sure what version of paradise to look back to—
Troy, Eden, or Afolabe‘s village, Paleolithic hunters, Han Shan of Cold Mountain, or the
Anasazi. Walcott‘s and Snyder‘s pasts are fundamentally bioregional. They draw their
energy from the bitterness of a broken contract with nature to attempt to name the world
again for everyone, and the way that they construe everyone is through the concept of a
bioregion emanating in concentric ecological circles from their home ranges. Since they
deal with ocean currents and watersheds, these communities are consequently
transnational and hybrid, but they are not eclectic or postmodern pastiche.
Walcott and Snyder initiate the search for belonging outside the metropole in the
bioregional places people inherit by applying a both/and logic to the hybrid cultures
competing for narratives of place. Their strategy is to entwine these competing discourses
in a coherent aesthetic that is inspiring and feasible. Snyder and Walcott recycle ancient