Word: whiteness
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...White Egrets” is aptly named; images of the splendid birds are scattered throughout the collection. In one instance, the birds become symbols of immortality as Walcott contemplates the inevitable mortality of himself and his friends. The birds, part of a natural cycle, return annually, seemingly unchanged, while the personalities around him disappear year by year: “Some friends, the few I have left / are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain / as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift / like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.” Elsewhere, he himself identifies...
Even when Walcott is not explicitly contemplating the process of aging, whiteness saturates his vision; he notices the white shore, white ferries, white wine, the “white scream” of birds, and even the whiteness of the page as his poem comes to a close. In his constant encounters with objects washed in white, Walcott is trying to create a kind of visual rhyme. In his poem “In Italy,” in which he speaks of his experience in Italy as an elderly man, he writes, “my hair rhymes with...
...always returns to those figures of purity and openness, the white birds who are symbols of both age and immortality. With a long career already behind him, Walcott’s concern lies not only with the precariousness of his physical life, but also with the lifespan of the poetry that he has spent a lifetime crafting. This collection, however, indicates that there is no cause for the poet’s anxiety. Walcott has managed to shape a sequence of poems as blindingly majestic as the birds for which they are named...
...Susan Zeeman Rogers. The main set piece, a luminous red backlit curtain with thick black vertical lines and a series of numbers scrawled graffiti-like across it, gives the feeling of being trapped in a prison cell of tortured mathematics. The stage floor is expansively checkered black and white, spreading like a maniacal chessboard, as if to imply that the men and women who traverse it are merely pawns at the hands of some greater power...
...According to the White House, the START follow-on will cut deployed warheads - those mounted on intercontinental missiles or bombers - to 1,550 for each side, which is about 30% below current levels. The total number of missiles and bombers available for launch at any given time will be cut to 700, less than half of current levels. That still leaves more than enough firepower to destroy the infrastructure and war-fighting capacity of both nations many times over. What's more, the treaty focuses only on deployed warheads, and does not limit the amount of warheads, missiles and bombers...