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The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
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.” To Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise, one might add the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant; the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Now, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of his storied career. Here is his very earliest work—“In My Eighteenth Year,” published when he was eighteen; his first widely celebrated verses—“A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work—“The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces—the tenderness of “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, edited by the celebrated English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions and passions that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.
“He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.” To Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise, one might add the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant; the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Now, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of his storied career. Here is his very earliest work—“In My Eighteenth Year,” published when he was eighteen; his first widely celebrated verses—“A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work—“The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces—the tenderness of “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, edited by the celebrated English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions and passions that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.
640 pages, Hardcover
First published January 21, 2014
103 people are currently reading
1542 people want to read
About the author
Derek Walcott
180 books499 followersDerek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."
His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
September 27, 2020
The Sea Is History
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,
the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:
Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,
that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor
the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,
and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages
looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,
brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw
of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?
Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;
strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,
past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;
and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,
and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,
and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;
then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,
and at evening, the midges' choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God
as His son set, and that was the New Testament.
Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—
jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,
but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;
then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,
fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,
and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning.
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,
the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:
Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,
that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor
the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,
and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages
looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,
brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw
of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?
Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;
strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,
past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;
and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,
and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,
and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;
then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,
and at evening, the midges' choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God
as His son set, and that was the New Testament.
Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—
jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,
but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;
then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,
fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,
and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of History, really beginning.
January 18, 2015
The early work is too caught up in a colonial's effort to demonstrate mastery of the English canon. And the late poems are less radical than his best work, heavy on reminiscence and travel. (But if you had been born on a small island, got windfalls late in life from the MacArthur Foundation and the Nobel Prize Committee, and were fortunate enough to live into a ninth decade, wouldn't you spend your time globe-trotting and reminiscing? Of course you would, we all would.) But in between, and on the bookends as well, so much insight, so elegantly, poignantly rendered.
September 30, 2024
Walcott possesses a glorious athleticism of rhyme, and his meditations on the shadowed and cursed inheritance of colonialism carry a poignant gravitas. The whole, however, is undermined by an academic complacency that dulls poetic impact with a flood of references to anywhere and anything but the poem's own heart.
October 26, 2019
from “A Far Cry from Africa”
Derek Walcott
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
The poem which is an outcry of colonialism describes the marginalized voices, as a commonwealth poet, he is speaking the voices of minorities, talking about racism and isolation. As Frantz Fanon in "Black Skin, White Masks" mentions this makes the narrator nervous and marginalized from the whole society. There is a question of identity here which has been left uncertain. The paradoxes we see in this poem are a collection of contraries.
The poem has a tone of anger and despair.
Derek Walcott
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
The poem which is an outcry of colonialism describes the marginalized voices, as a commonwealth poet, he is speaking the voices of minorities, talking about racism and isolation. As Frantz Fanon in "Black Skin, White Masks" mentions this makes the narrator nervous and marginalized from the whole society. There is a question of identity here which has been left uncertain. The paradoxes we see in this poem are a collection of contraries.
The poem has a tone of anger and despair.
March 14, 2015
3½ stars. My biggest complaint is that this volume is overwhelming -- too large to be appreciated in a 2-week library loan. If I owned this and could read the poems more slowly I would probably be giving it a higher rating. As it is, I just read about 300 pages before it had to be returned. Luckily my strategy of reading from about 6 different locations gave me a chance to experience at least a taste of each of the major selections included.
I found that my favorite section was from "White Egrets" although the "Midsummer" section ran a close second. I didn't care for the early work nearly as much as the later poetry.
I found that my favorite section was from "White Egrets" although the "Midsummer" section ran a close second. I didn't care for the early work nearly as much as the later poetry.
September 28, 2024
I think that there are a lot of great poems in this books, and poems with great phrases and lyricism. Also there are a lot of confusing poems in this book and somewhat obscure poems with disorganized rhyme schemes. Mostly, this book is a lot of poems. Even a month was too fast to go through them, but ai can’t keep a library book forever. I’m glad I explored this body of work, but this book has almost too much going on. It’s 600 pages of retrospective poetry samples with very little info on the poet himself or the context of his work. It was easy to get lost. Beautiful scenery, but where the heck am I?
Want to read
April 10, 2019The Time Traveler's Wife kitabının girişinde Love After Love şiirine düşmem sonucunda bu TBR’yi yapıyorum. ❤
July 23, 2024
Walcott's initial inspiration for writing verse came from the joy of being alive in the beautiful outdoors of the Caribbean islands, where the sea and everything related to the sea began to take on a special significance.
With his artist's eye for detail, he represented the lights and colours that played in the scenes in the island of St. Lucia and words became particularly momentous to capture the sounds, the music, the beat of Caribbean life.
The poet wanted to merge his personal inward experience of the rich tradition of the English language and literature of his education to enhance his love for the islanders and the islands with a love that only a poet can bring.
He felt:
But islands can only exist
If we have loved in them.
The West Indies had experienced a history of slavery, colonialism, deprivation and alienation and tourism was on the ascendancy. Walcott did not feel the need to migrate to England or the United States like many of his contemporaries did.
Walcott was dedicated enough to realise that he could work from within towards a creation of the Caribbean culture, by tempering the Standard English idiom used predominantly in the major cities for all forms of discourse with a creolised English incorporating various patois languages.
Coming to terms with his hybridity, Walcott was critical of those trying to propagate the Negro ideologies for he felt many politicians were exploiting the memories of the past.
In an interview in 1971, Walcott draws attention to the fact that "the problem is to recognise our African origins but not to romanticise them".
Thus, he writes of himself
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation…
In his first collection ‘In a Green Night Poems’, [1948-60], Walcott appears tentative and innocent in his search for identity. Despite the uncertainty of tone, there is great ardour attached to his work.
He is conscious of the problems of his birth in the West Indies, and he is ready to confront the conflicts of his European and African ancestry.
‘A Far Cry from Africa' can be seen as the most representative poem of a period that, despite its surface simplicity of language, is wracked by the violence of racial conflicts in the islands.
He sees that colonisation has reduced the African people to the level of uncivilised savages or helpless animals that must be hunted. He perceives their transportation to, and exploitation on, the American continent through the suffering of the Judaic People-a metaphor in several poems. His people, too, are as "expendable as Jews".
He sums up his life's dilemma when he cries out at the close of "A Far Cry from Africa":
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between thisA frica and theE nglish tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Walcott's metaphors indicate his appropriation of a language that is at its unusual best because it is least restricted by cliches. To draw another parallel, he refers to Spain and the pity of the Civil War.
He does pity them all the blacks and the whites-who have chosen violence and are the victims of destruction they themselves have unleashed. If the conqueror is a "superman" and the savage is a "gorilla" then he cannot deny his involvement and suffering in the actions of both races as he is poisoned with the blood of both. where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
The question cannot be resolved however much he is turn apart by the conflicts of history. Moreover, how can he choose between them --- "this Africa and this English tongue I love?"
The just opinion would be to betray them both or accept his literary talent by admitting what he owes to his dual heritage "give back what they give".
Though this last is a rhetorical question in his poem, it is also a statement that his identity comes from a flow of history and events that have taken his past and given him his present. He cannot retaliate without suffering immense loss in the future.
This dilemma is one that confronts all West Indian writers and many others of the post-colonial world. Walcott is perhaps at his best when he is most autographical.
He seems to be working on his thesis --- What is history? What is identity for the Caribbean islanders as he composes, integrates and sums up his most mature thoughts, in each succeeding collection of poems.
'Names', which appears in Sea Grapes shows his preoccupation with the same theme and Walcott starts the poem with a sense of his own history that is contained in the sea surrounding the Islands. He negates the fact that identity can be named for he has "no nouns" with which to introduce himself. His race can be interpreted as his community or his tribe; it is also the personal race he is running towards an individual identity.
The identity of the post- colonial poet in the English language is further compounded by the fact that he comes from the French-speaking part of the Islands. And he cannot deny his French heritage. As a twentieth-century poet, he tries to focus on various worlds --- the reality of the present and its fantasy in reflection, and the past in his own imagination. Yet he is not able to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion.
Walcott develops his theme of exile and alienation through each collection bringing together the underlying distress of people-from the lot of Amerindian tribes, to the mixed races in the West Indies, and finally includes the tropical exile of the white conquerors.
He sees his own people's fractured identity against the topography of the Islands, where the pictures of land and sea serve to stress the nostalgic loss.
Walcott becomes more elegiac and sombre as his thesis unfolds further until he feels that there is no identity he can retrieve except what is recorded in the sea; so, 'The Sea Is History'.
The poem stretches his sense of disillusionment beyond his immediate origin. Walcott seeks answers in other histories of suffering and uses those as metaphors to describe the condition of his own people. He also debates the theory that Biblical events are not historical but mythical.
Throughout the poem, he is aware that the blacks have little individual history they can reconstruct but must revert to the year 1492, when as the essayist Sir John Squire describes "Columbus's doom-burdened caravels" sailed to the West Indies by mistake.-
The poet sees his Caribbean heritage as a set of collected values that he can use to challenge the materialistic, consumer society the Islands have become, where individualism is only another brand of self-centredness.
Even as he calls his poetic talents a "mulatto of style" Walcott wishes the multiracial, polyglot islanders to liberate themselves and really celebrate their hybrid culture that actually represents all the world's major cultures.
Walcott's deepest desire is to give his subdued society a voice of its own. He also perhaps wishes for a future where the dilemma of being black in skin and white in mind can be solved irrevocably.
It is interesting to know that Walcott's name was suggested as Poet Laureate in England as successor to Ted Hughes. In a sense, this has greater significance than the coveted Nobel Prize for it meant that Walcott would represent Britain as a multicultural society and reconfirm the link between the Crown and the Commonwealth countries.
With his artist's eye for detail, he represented the lights and colours that played in the scenes in the island of St. Lucia and words became particularly momentous to capture the sounds, the music, the beat of Caribbean life.
The poet wanted to merge his personal inward experience of the rich tradition of the English language and literature of his education to enhance his love for the islanders and the islands with a love that only a poet can bring.
He felt:
But islands can only exist
If we have loved in them.
The West Indies had experienced a history of slavery, colonialism, deprivation and alienation and tourism was on the ascendancy. Walcott did not feel the need to migrate to England or the United States like many of his contemporaries did.
Walcott was dedicated enough to realise that he could work from within towards a creation of the Caribbean culture, by tempering the Standard English idiom used predominantly in the major cities for all forms of discourse with a creolised English incorporating various patois languages.
Coming to terms with his hybridity, Walcott was critical of those trying to propagate the Negro ideologies for he felt many politicians were exploiting the memories of the past.
In an interview in 1971, Walcott draws attention to the fact that "the problem is to recognise our African origins but not to romanticise them".
Thus, he writes of himself
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation…
In his first collection ‘In a Green Night Poems’, [1948-60], Walcott appears tentative and innocent in his search for identity. Despite the uncertainty of tone, there is great ardour attached to his work.
He is conscious of the problems of his birth in the West Indies, and he is ready to confront the conflicts of his European and African ancestry.
‘A Far Cry from Africa' can be seen as the most representative poem of a period that, despite its surface simplicity of language, is wracked by the violence of racial conflicts in the islands.
He sees that colonisation has reduced the African people to the level of uncivilised savages or helpless animals that must be hunted. He perceives their transportation to, and exploitation on, the American continent through the suffering of the Judaic People-a metaphor in several poems. His people, too, are as "expendable as Jews".
He sums up his life's dilemma when he cries out at the close of "A Far Cry from Africa":
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between thisA frica and theE nglish tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Walcott's metaphors indicate his appropriation of a language that is at its unusual best because it is least restricted by cliches. To draw another parallel, he refers to Spain and the pity of the Civil War.
He does pity them all the blacks and the whites-who have chosen violence and are the victims of destruction they themselves have unleashed. If the conqueror is a "superman" and the savage is a "gorilla" then he cannot deny his involvement and suffering in the actions of both races as he is poisoned with the blood of both. where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
The question cannot be resolved however much he is turn apart by the conflicts of history. Moreover, how can he choose between them --- "this Africa and this English tongue I love?"
The just opinion would be to betray them both or accept his literary talent by admitting what he owes to his dual heritage "give back what they give".
Though this last is a rhetorical question in his poem, it is also a statement that his identity comes from a flow of history and events that have taken his past and given him his present. He cannot retaliate without suffering immense loss in the future.
This dilemma is one that confronts all West Indian writers and many others of the post-colonial world. Walcott is perhaps at his best when he is most autographical.
He seems to be working on his thesis --- What is history? What is identity for the Caribbean islanders as he composes, integrates and sums up his most mature thoughts, in each succeeding collection of poems.
'Names', which appears in Sea Grapes shows his preoccupation with the same theme and Walcott starts the poem with a sense of his own history that is contained in the sea surrounding the Islands. He negates the fact that identity can be named for he has "no nouns" with which to introduce himself. His race can be interpreted as his community or his tribe; it is also the personal race he is running towards an individual identity.
The identity of the post- colonial poet in the English language is further compounded by the fact that he comes from the French-speaking part of the Islands. And he cannot deny his French heritage. As a twentieth-century poet, he tries to focus on various worlds --- the reality of the present and its fantasy in reflection, and the past in his own imagination. Yet he is not able to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion.
Walcott develops his theme of exile and alienation through each collection bringing together the underlying distress of people-from the lot of Amerindian tribes, to the mixed races in the West Indies, and finally includes the tropical exile of the white conquerors.
He sees his own people's fractured identity against the topography of the Islands, where the pictures of land and sea serve to stress the nostalgic loss.
Walcott becomes more elegiac and sombre as his thesis unfolds further until he feels that there is no identity he can retrieve except what is recorded in the sea; so, 'The Sea Is History'.
The poem stretches his sense of disillusionment beyond his immediate origin. Walcott seeks answers in other histories of suffering and uses those as metaphors to describe the condition of his own people. He also debates the theory that Biblical events are not historical but mythical.
Throughout the poem, he is aware that the blacks have little individual history they can reconstruct but must revert to the year 1492, when as the essayist Sir John Squire describes "Columbus's doom-burdened caravels" sailed to the West Indies by mistake.-
The poet sees his Caribbean heritage as a set of collected values that he can use to challenge the materialistic, consumer society the Islands have become, where individualism is only another brand of self-centredness.
Even as he calls his poetic talents a "mulatto of style" Walcott wishes the multiracial, polyglot islanders to liberate themselves and really celebrate their hybrid culture that actually represents all the world's major cultures.
Walcott's deepest desire is to give his subdued society a voice of its own. He also perhaps wishes for a future where the dilemma of being black in skin and white in mind can be solved irrevocably.
It is interesting to know that Walcott's name was suggested as Poet Laureate in England as successor to Ted Hughes. In a sense, this has greater significance than the coveted Nobel Prize for it meant that Walcott would represent Britain as a multicultural society and reconfirm the link between the Crown and the Commonwealth countries.
August 9, 2018
'Reading' a book of poetry is a challenging concept - it's simply not appropiate. You don't go through poems like you're reading a novel. So the 'currently reading' status may be permanent.
That said, Derek Walcott has been my favourite poet for some years. His writing is often quite dense and it certainly requires effort, but it's immensely evocative and rich, even satisfying to me if I don't really grasp all he's saying. Quite deservedly, Walcott won the Nobel prize in 1992 .
That said, Derek Walcott has been my favourite poet for some years. His writing is often quite dense and it certainly requires effort, but it's immensely evocative and rich, even satisfying to me if I don't really grasp all he's saying. Quite deservedly, Walcott won the Nobel prize in 1992 .
January 2, 2017
My favourite poet.
August 8, 2023
This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges a headland with mountains appears brokenly then is hidden again until what emerges from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges, its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed into the widening harbor of a town with no noise, its streets growing closer like print you can now read, two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes, as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes white again and the book comes to a close.
November 9, 2023
Stunningly written meditations on colonialism in the Caribbean and the conception of homeland, of leaving and returning.
I don’t think epic poems are for me - maybe if I took the time over them but in a 500 page collection that I need to return to the library, it’s too much. I’m sure they’d be brilliant if I read them properly.
I don’t think epic poems are for me - maybe if I took the time over them but in a 500 page collection that I need to return to the library, it’s too much. I’m sure they’d be brilliant if I read them properly.
June 20, 2024
In general, I like Walcott and his clever turns of phrase. That said, when I see, “Believably accused of sexual harassment in the 90’s” I read it, “Definitely guilty of sexual harassment in the 90’s.” Admittedly, I have a hard time separating people from their crimes, so take it as you will.
September 17, 2022
دائماً ما اواجه صعوبة في استساغة الشعر المترجم
ورغم محاولات شريف بقنه لتسهيل الوضع علي كقارئة إلا أنني واجهت صعوبة في تقبله
كل الشكر لجهود المترجم
ولقصيدة حب بعد حب فقط 💙
ورغم محاولات شريف بقنه لتسهيل الوضع علي كقارئة إلا أنني واجهت صعوبة في تقبله
كل الشكر لجهود المترجم
ولقصيدة حب بعد حب فقط 💙
October 3, 2022
Simply awesome. 10/10
January 9, 2023
"Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem."
May 11, 2023
partial reading
Read
March 8, 2024'be grateful that you wrote well in this place,
let the torn poems sail from you like a flock
of white egrets in a long last sigh of release.'
let the torn poems sail from you like a flock
of white egrets in a long last sigh of release.'
May 1, 2020
Absolutely incredible. I have never read poetry like this before - it is superb. I can't put it into words myself, but these two quotes explain it all:
- ‘His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it’ (Sean O’Brien)
- ‘The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across meter, whether meter is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides.’ (Glyn Maxwell)
- ‘His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it’ (Sean O’Brien)
- ‘The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across meter, whether meter is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides.’ (Glyn Maxwell)
February 24, 2015
I know nothing about poetry but I really enjoyed this.
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August 9, 2016After being introduced to Derek Walcott in Prof class, I've been a fan and was excited to find this volume.
November 21, 2016
As much as I hate Walcott (and I really do), it's hard to deny that his poetry is pretty damn good. Just try your hardest to look past the blatant misogyny and you might even enjoy it
July 29, 2016
Wonderful poetry.
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April 10, 2017Some fellow patron put a hold on this so I had to rush through, but with that in mind, parts of the early poems strongly recalled Auden (particularly for me, but among others). The experimentations in short form seemed uneven, and I was partly glad when he returned to his strengths later, but I also kind of wish he'd gone further with the island dialect he tried here and there. The humor in the later years really seemed to balance out the style. I wish he would've had more time to draw that out.
April 18, 2017
CHE
In this dark-grained news-photograph, whose glare
is rigidly composed as Caravaggio's,
the corpse glows candle-white on its cold altar--
its stone Bolivian Indian butcher's slab--
stare till its waxen flesh begins to harden
to marble, to veined, Andean iron;
fro your own fear, cabron, its pallor grows;
it stumbled from your doubt, and for your pardon
burnt in brown trash, far from the embalming snows.
In this dark-grained news-photograph, whose glare
is rigidly composed as Caravaggio's,
the corpse glows candle-white on its cold altar--
its stone Bolivian Indian butcher's slab--
stare till its waxen flesh begins to harden
to marble, to veined, Andean iron;
fro your own fear, cabron, its pallor grows;
it stumbled from your doubt, and for your pardon
burnt in brown trash, far from the embalming snows.
Read
November 16, 2017Enchanting
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews