Reconciling Disparate Worlds

...and later, sleeping unsteadily, as bul(frogs hurl harsh gravelly notes from slingshot throats, you may wonder why you ever left the city...

...Usually, he concentrates on small subjects, miniature perceptions...

...A more moving exploration of cultural conflict is found in "The Hotel Normandie Pool...

...Anyone who has ever been disturbed by the nocturnal chorus of bullfrogs knows the powerful elastic snap propelling each croak...

...But his treason achieves nothing for the people he tries to help...

...Born on St...

...Ovid tells Walcott, "When I was first exiled, /I missed my language as your tongue needs salt...

...Unfortunately, engaging as all this is, I am finally unconvinced by Spoiler...

...Mercy...

...The protagonist, formerly "A Sussex don, [who] taught the Jacobean anxieties: [such grim plays as John Webster's symbolically titled] The White Devil," is now a British government official selling secrets to the black emissaries of an unnamed Third World nation .The traitor's motive is a desperate pity inspired by the horrors he has witnessed on his diplomatic journeys: outrages that have poisoned everything, so that even inanimate objects now seem infected with the world's misery: At the window in Haiti, I remember a gekko pressed against the hotel glass, with white palms, concentrating head...

...Looking out at a Manhattan illumined by the dying light, Leithauser feels that it "seems to say we come/ through drudgery to glory...

...His first book, Hundreds of Fireflies (Knopf, 71 pp., $11.50), confirms my sense of pleasure...

...Walcott has good reason to understand the character of the double agent, for he is himself a citizen of two realms, at home in neither...

...Called "Between Leaps," this poem hops like a frog from its literal similes about appearances to an imaginative domain where matter is renewed and energized with the writer's characteristic luminosity...

...Tennis Instructor, 1971" is a delicate rite of passage in which the Harvard-bound high-school graduate takes his place in the adult world through coaching a class of women, all old enough to be his mother...

...Meditating on estrangement and divorce (from family and homeland), the poet reflects that his own ancestors were both "slave and Roman": and "My own face/held negro Neros, chalk Caligulas...

...The poem sees the apocalyptic images from the Bible and African legend casting a darkening shadow across the white pages of UN reports...

...Another poet might have found bitter irony in the illusion of life in the face of death...

...The most somber spectacle can still provoke his hopeful imagination to a vision of rebirth...

...For several years I have been following his poetry with delight whenever it appears in magazines...

...BRAD LEITHAUSER SEEMS to be at home anyplace...

...Leithauser's ideas are effervescent with optimism...

...He invokes the shade of Ovid, a master of the classical Roman style banished to the Baltic by an angry emperor and forced to live out his life among barbarians who spoke no Latin...

...Steeples like tribal lances, through congealing fog the cries of wounded churchbells wrapped in cotton, gray mist enfolding the conspirator like a sealed envelope next to its heart...

...till, on a tablet smooth as the pool's skin, I made reflections that, in many ways./were even stronger than their origin...

...On Poetry RECONCILING DISPARATE WORLDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE TITLE POEM of Derek Walcott's The Fortunate Traveler (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 99 pp., $ 11.95) reads like a miniature Graham Greene novel...

...In this poem, Derek Walcott takes his rightful place among that band of poets—including, in our own time, such masters as Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney—who sing their songs in an alien land, suspended between irreconcilable worlds...

...If they often seem to war against one another, rather than blend, to Walcott this is only the consequence of living in worlds that have not yet learned to peacefully coexist...

...Watching another frog, the poet observes that "his back's/ tawny-spotted, like an elderly hand,/but flanks the crisp, projecting green/of new/leafage, as if what ran through his veins/was chlorophyll and he'd tapped that vegetal sorcery/which, making light of physical bounds, /makes food/of light...

...Today, he divides his time between Trinidad and the United States (where he teaches at Columbia and Harvard...

...Here as elsewhere in Hundreds of Fireflies, many disparate worldsare reconciled...

...Lucia in the Caribbean of mixed parentage, he is torn between the British tradition of his education and the island patois spoken around him in his childhood...

...This is an exciting debut from an ambitious and brilliant poet...

...Through shaggy pines the beaks of needling birds pricked me at Tomis to learn their tribal tongue, so, since desire is stronger than its disease, my pen's beak parted till we chirped one song in the unequal shade of equal trees...

...Many of Leithauser's descriptions would seem trivial were they not so minutely exact, the choice of words apt, rhyme and meter playfully controlled, the voice fresh and clear...

...nothing ain't change but color and attire, so back me up, Old Brigade of Satire, back me up, Martial, Juvenal, and Pope The Spoiler, a black pop musician, has died...

...Returning to earth to look over his old haunts, he cheekily tells his friends, "I decompose, but I composing still...

...Famine sighs like a scythe across the field of statistics and the desert is a moving mouth...

...is sharks with shirt-jacs, sharks with well-pressed fins ripping we small fry off with razor grins...

...The young man works his way through writer's block by staying late at the office, and while there, attempting parodies of famous poems—an interesting peek at how he acquired his easy grace with forms...

...In his writings he uncompromisingly strives to combine both voices...

...As Leithauser becomes increasingly comfortable with the legal world, "the whole courtly game/of claim and counterclaim," he discovers as well the actual nature of his poetic gifts...

...Among the often strident clamor of youthful poetic voices, Leithauser's stands out for its rare combination of exaltation and skillful control...

...An Expanded Want Ad," describing the qualities of a summer cottage, remarks with good humor to the wary renter: Now, it may happen the first nights you'll feel an odd unease, not lessened by the moths' crazed tapping at the glass...

...In "The Spoiler's Return," one of his "West-Indian" poems, Walcott combines the local dialect of Trinidad with the elevated rhetoric of classical satire: The shark, racing the shadow of the shark across clear coral rocks, does make them dark— that is my premonition of the scene of what is passing over this Caribbean...

...Stoically, the Roman satirist describes how among clod-fires, wolfskins, starving herds, Tibullus'flute faded, sweetest of shepherds...

...In the hold of this earth 10,000,000 shoreless souls are drifting____ "We'll meet you in Bristol to conclude the agreement...

...We watched The clear waves curl, then break Against the chest like a heartbeat...

...Mercy, monsieur...

...A dead deer on the beach "Along Lake Michigan," for example, merely fills the poet and his companion with disbelief—death simply cannot exist in this place: We held hands, kneeling beside the body As if we could impart a gift Of movement: possible here, on a day When we'd seen sticks slither And stones take flight, for this A nimal to rise at our whispering and shake Sleep from its sandy coat...

...The agents with whom he conspired turn against him...

...moreover, he comes to realize that man's inhumanity to man pales beside the opposition of Nature itself...

...Perhaps the most impressive and developed part of Hundreds of Fireflies is a section entitled "Two Summer Jobs...

...Law Clerk, 1979" (Leithauser is now a lawyer) traces the subtle development of a mature poetic sensibility...

...With a child's hands...

...As the Roman wrests civilization out of savagery, Walcott finds comfort for his losses and sense of estrangement in the knowledge that Ovid wrote his greatest works after he left the eternal city...

...For Leithauser, however, as for Shelley, death itself is a dream from which we awaken into the white radiance of eternity...

...A scene of the conventionally dressed law clerk encountering a bluejeaned former classmate from Harvard, also an aspiring poet, now rusticated to the country to make pots, is a sly parody of the usual cliches about nonconformist poets...

...The poem's rhythms veer crazily between the syncopation of steel drums and the measured thrusts of heroic couplets...

...As did Judas, the " fortunate traveler" has fallen captive to a dream of secular redemption where the wastes of the world are reclaimed by miracles of human ingenuity to produce "an Africa flooded with such light/as alchemized the first fields of emmar, wheat and barley...

...These sustained narratives depict the unfolding portrait of the artist as a budding poet...

...He sounds too much like Jonathan Swift in blackface...