The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

By Derek Walcott

2014

First Published

4.24

Average Rating

640

Number of Pages

19H26M

Audio Length

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 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 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.

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Author

Derek Walcott

Author · 28 books

Derek 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.