The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 - 9780374125615

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.