Introduction

1.1 THE REAL AND THE FICTIVE

My aim in this book is to give an account of what islands have signified through history and across the planet as that significance finds expression in poetry. This might sound like a grand claim, impossible of realization; it is proffered here in the spirit of the reflection by the French writer Blaise Pascal (1620–1666): "Since we cannot achieve universality by knowing everything that there is to know about everything, we must know a little about everything" (Pascal 1995, 64–65, §228). I should hasten to add that my aim is more modest than to have read and reflected on every poem about every island on the planet. Rather, it subscribes to an idea voiced in a dramatic monologue from Men and Women, 1855 by the English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) through his fictive representation of the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto, that there is a logic — at once simple, paradoxical, and compelling — to why "a man's reach should exceed his grasp" (Browning 1920, 170).

Thus, it is my intention to point selectively toward the triple interest inherent to all island writing: that it refracts natural environments, dramatizes a continual interplay between the perceived and the imagined, and demonstrates commonalty as well as difference between island cultures. This triple interest enjoins the kind of recognition that the Antiguan poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017) celebrates in "A Sea Chantey" through what he calls "the beads of a rosary," a litany of names singling out islands for all their individual and collective distinctiveness: Anguilla, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Grenada, and so on (Walcott 2014, 44–46). With a somewhat different aim in mind, the Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881–1972) relishes the simple enumeration of island names, unconnected except in how they sound together, bringing dissimilar things into a single series purely for the incantatory power of syntax to evoke a medley of associations, when named thus: Ithaca, Eriskay, Iceland, Tahiti, Crete, Corsica, Mytilene, Aran, and Iona (MacDiarmid 1939, 47).

In this book I have attempted a compound answer to a single question: How does poetry represent islands? The answers are many. Poetry picks out from an island experience that which most calls for articulation and remembrance. It reports on island memories as well as perceptions and reflections. It describes and evokes islands. It mourns and celebrates in equal measure, giving proof not merely that someone existed in relation to an island experience but also of how that existence might matter vitally to those living in other times and places. Island poetry invites us to imagine more than it can tell or show. It dreams up fictive islands almost as often as it describes real ones; it wants you to know what it might feel like to live there, even if only in imagination. It believes in the mind's eye just as much as, or perhaps a little more than, what our eyes can see and what our ears can hear of island sights and sounds.

What's in a Name?

The word island, we are reminded by Joseph W. Meeker, is derived from the "Latin terra en sala (land in the sea)," which "became in English 'isolated land,' then simply island" (Meeker 2011, 197). So, what's in a name? The obvious answer to that question is "everything." The American poet Gary Snyder (b. 1930), for example, would prefer that his country men and women "give up the European word 'America' and accept the new-old name for the continent, 'Turtle Island'" (Snyder 1974, 105). Any place-name is an invention attached to a real place for a time and with a reason. Denis Cosgrove reminds us, in Apollo's Eye (2001):

The globe's geographical naming is necessarily arbitrary and conventional rather than logical or empirical, its apparent order and stability in atlas or world map deceptive: the nominal globe is a space of contestation rather than of concord. (Cosgrove 2001, 12)

In poetic writing, to dwell on a place is to reflect on and resonate to the natural as well as the human dimension of its geography and history.

Consider the complicated history by which part of the Caribbean islands came to be called the Antilles: Peter Conrad, in Islands: A Trip through Time and Space (2009), narrates a line of transmission from a Roman adaptation of the name Atlantis to the invention of a phantasmal pair of balmy islands called Antilia, which came to represent a mythical refuge for Christians in Portugal after the Moorish conquest, and thence to Columbus during his first encounter with the Caribbean, using the word Antilles to encompass the archipelago that he marveled at (Conrad 2009, 75–76).

The French ethnographer and writer Victor Segalen (1878–1919) proposed in 1904, when in sight of the island of Java, that the notion of the exotic might be approached through a parallelism between stepping back in time and moving out in space (Segalen 2002, 13). My method is comparable, except in dissuading us to think of any place as exotic: to balance moving freely across time and space while remaining intent on treating both the past and the distant as present in the moment of attention. The sustaining of such a balance is celebrated by two Francophone writers from the Antilles — Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) and Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) — as the sovereignty of the here and now (Glissant 1997, 37).

The poetry of place makes it a task to name the intuitive being of a place as bespoken by climate and topography; by the histories of habitation, development, and depredation; and by all that a place has been before and after the time of the anthropocene. The result, each time, is an alliance between the real and the invented, between islands as home for the human (and other than the human), and islands as homes for the imagination. These considerations provide the book with a broad strategy: representative exemplification and analysis of the interaction between poetry and fiction, and between poetry and facticity. Islands foreground the relation between the natural — the intricate web that ties geology, geography, climate, plant, and animal life together on any island — and the routines and preoccupations of human existence, experienced in both individual and collective terms. Such relations are articulated by language in a variety of modes, from description and...