He sees egrets the colour of waterfalls

White Egrets. By Derek Walcott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 96 pages; $24. Faber; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

MODERN poetry seems all too often to be associated with coy, small-minded ironists; teasing, finicky word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach, and even the range of subject matter of great poets of the past. Where to go these days to find the real thing?

Derek Walcott, born on the Caribbean island of St Lucia in 1930, and winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 1992, is one answer. Mr Walcott’s poetry has often possessed a clarity, an emotional forcefulness and a descriptive exuberance which has set him apart from most of the rest. For all that, his last book, “Selected Poems” (2007), was something of a disappointment, displaying little of his range and his greatness as a poet. “Omeros”, his 1990 novel-length masterpiece, for example, was represented by an extract no more than a tenth of the original.

His new book, “White Egrets”, by comparison, is a magnificent, late achievement. As in “Omeros”, where local fishermen assumed the identities of heroes from Homer, Mr Walcott raises up the local—the sights and the sounds of his native St Lucia—until they become the stuff of epic. This is a book that luxuriates in description and the use of extended metaphor, as Homer did himself. The book explores the idea of self-renewal. It is an elegiac work—Mr Walcott was 80 in January—whose stance recalls two other great poets who raged against the dying of the light, Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats.

As with Yeats, the very possibility of death’s approach gives a new urgency and a new energy to the apprehending eye. Everything to be seen and heard becomes precious and surprising. The spirit of nature in Mr Walcott’s work is unquenchable, unkillable. Those white egrets, ever ministering presences, turn and return throughout the book, representing the brilliance and beauty of everything that is. They are also “bleached regrets of an old man’s memoirs”.

Although the book begins in St Lucia, it goes on to range widely around what he calls “old Europe”—Capri, Sicily, Andalucia and Amsterdam. The Europe of which Mr Walcott writes is both real and some fabled notion of the real, set apart, as much in its past as in its present. It is a place of the imagination as much as of the eye. Mr Walcott writes of places seen with an imagistic crispness, a snapshot-spareness; “fields of seaweed [that] reach as far as Guinea” is his view of the Atlantic Ocean. “If the soul ever rests, its next beach will be Dakar”.

As he starts to remember, he pays homage to some of the great European poets who have influenced his life and writing, especially Petrarch and the “symmetrical tension” of Dante. The phrasing in “White Egrets” has a mellifluous, rhapsodic quality throughout, hymning the beauty of the earth even as it recognises the precious fragility both of what it sees, and of the recording eye itself.