A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated,
inimitable, essential career
He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of
infinity embodied in the language. Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of
praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet
Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the
Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the
poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like
In My Eighteenth Year, published when the poet himself was still a
teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like A Far Cry from Africa,
which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his
mature work, like The Schooner Flight from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and
his late masterpieces, like the tender Sixty Years After, from the 2010
collection *White Egrets.
*Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have
defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of
identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean
island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural
world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of
growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This
collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell,
will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven
Walcott to write for more than half a century.
