The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 - Tapa dura

Praise for "The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013" "Derek Walcott is a natural poet. Walcott, who turned 84 this year, began writing young. His first poem appeared in a local paper when he was 14, and his first volume, "25 Poems", was self-published when he was 18. 'Everyone wants a prodigy to fail, ' Rita Dove wrote. 'It makes our mediocrity more bearable.' Walcott did not fail . . . Walcott pays indefatigable attention to the look of things, and writes with a spendthrift approach to the word-hoard . . . He [brings] the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems. They are great piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, often employing rhyme or slant rhyme, great layers of adjectives firming up the noun underpainting . . . The writing leaves mere lyricism far behind and rises to the level of prophetic speech, as in the extraordinary poem 'The Season of Phantasmal Peace.' One inescapable conclusion from reading hundreds of pages of Walcott at once is the feeling that this is the lifework of an ecstatic . . . Walcott has few equals in the use of metaphor. In his imagination, each thing seems to be linked to another by a special bond, unapparent until he points it out, permanently fresh once he does. Most of these metaphors he uses just once, brilliantly, discarding them in the onrush of description . . . The reader imagines Walcott, as he sets these striking images down, mentally shuttling between the fact of the world and the fact of the poem. Often, he is evoking the sea's activity, or the sky's, and making analogies with his own practice of describing it. And so it is that on the last poem on the last page of this largehearted and essential book, the two realities finally merge. The natural poet dissolves, astonished, into nature, 'as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes / white again and the book comes to a close.'" --Teju Cole, "The New York Times Book Review"""The Poetry of Derek Walcott"

'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 honours that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur 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 has grappled 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.