Description

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.