**Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected
poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work.
**
Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early
volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire,"
with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his later
major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the
contemporary long poem.
Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the
Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of
Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and
mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it
means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his
broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms,
language, and metaphor.
Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward
Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of
work, spanning almost half a century.