Midsummer

by Derek Walcott

Overview

The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose cricumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures.

Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-lief period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott's The Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466880436
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	78
File size:	182 KB

About the Author

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia and now lives in Trinidad and Boston. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of the Arts and Letters, and received the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award for his previous collection of poems, The Fortunate Traveller (1981).

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, seven collections of plays, and a book of essays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.