Derek Walcott | Slightly Foxed literary review

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‘The Schooner Flight’, [81] 57

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Voyage to the Blessed Isles

Andrew Joynes pm Derek Walcott, 'The Schooner Flight

I first came across Derek Walcott’s narrative poem ‘The Schooner Flight ’ in the mid-1980s, when I was travelling on a Commonwealth bursary through the Caribbean. I was away from England for two months, on an island-stepping journey whose final destination was St Lucia in the Windward Islands – where I once worked at a radio station, and where my wife and I spent the first two years of our marriage. I must have regarded my return to St Lucia after a decade and a half as a kind of culmination – Ithaca at the end of an odyssey – and I was nervous as I walked across the tarmac at Castries airport.