Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra by Omaar Hena

Abstract

Omaar Hena. Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xiv, 200. US$90. Here are two arguments you have likely encountered if you read postcolonial poetry: 1. Poet P, who uses English or European techniques, shows that we can consider those techniques wholly apart from their origins, because P uses them so well to present her non-English or non-European life, Those techniques are, simply, part of global literary scene, available for all poets equally. 2. Poet Q, who claims to eschew English or European techniques, demonstrates that poets must eschew them in order to represent non-English or non-European lives. Newly independent nations, especially those of African diaspora, need brand-new nation (Kamau Brathwaite); large, optimistic, non-European countries require new, unrestrained kind of language with the quality of sprawl (passim, Les Murray's name for wide-open, honest Australianness that his poetry also pursues). Omaar Hena's Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra is largely persuasive study of four Anglophone postcolonial poets that demonstrates and where both of these arguments can be wrong. Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Ingrid de Kok, and Daljit Nagra are all, as Hena claims, receiving and repurposing canonical literary (2), among them epic, pentameter, end rhyme, florilegium, elegiac lyric, and dramatic monologue. Hena does more with modes and genres than with forms in strict sense, caring more for history than for acoustics--though he can certainly hear latter. All four of these poets are nationally, if not internationally, honored for their of modes and forms. And yet, despite what word mastery suggests, Hena finds that these poets show what forms, modes, and genres cannot do. Their poems demonstrate how aesthetic uses of language can sometimes make legible their own limitations before social realities and poets can use literary form to show limits of structural inequalities that limit what art and artists can accomplish (162, 43). Hena accurately argues that Nagra's poems of mimicry and persona--with their foolish-wise Black British and Asian characters--point to stereotypical expectations integral to British multiculturalism that has given Nagra his success in United Kingdom: without cultural bias that these comic poems mock, there would be no basis for comedy. De Kok's lyric and elegiac poems--traditional in mode, though written in free verse--show a marginal writer must link up with cultural capital of authors recognized as central to Anglo-American cultural core ... to become legible in global North (159; emphasis in original). Walcott accomplished similar linkage in Omeros (1990), epic that Hena argues is conscious of what it appears to have lost in making those links, in adopting European symbols and sounds. In Omeros, both system of ocean currents that sailor Achille must traverse and world literary system that Walcott has traversed--with its fish and pirogues, its hexameters and its nationalisms--propose an aesthetic model of globalism hemmed in ... inequities of global literary marketplace and global inequity more generally (29). The closer Walcott gets to success and power (both aesthetic and institutional) through his command of literary forms, farther he seems from relatively powerless, marginal St. Lucia that he wants to represent. Put more baldly: you can write St. Lucia in way that makes St. Lucia seem important and legible in Manhattan and Islington, or you can write St. Lucia in way that makes you seem close to real St. Lucia, but you cannot do both at once. Hena argues that this circle cannot be squared. It can, however, be made into subject for epic poem, boosted by puns and dialect spellings, as in name of Achilles canoe: In God We Troust. …