Collected Poems, 1948-1984

by Derek Walcott

Overview

This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing—for several decades—a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374520250
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/01/1987
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	454,981
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 8.51(h) x 1.41(d)

About the Author

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Table of Contents

	from In a Green Night Poems 1948-1960 [1962]
	Prelude	3
	As John to Patmos	5
	A City's Death by Fire	6
	The Harbour	7
	from Selected Poems [1964]
	Origins	11
	from In a Green Night (1962)
	A Far Cry from Africa	17
	Ruins of a Great House	19
	Tales of the Islands	22
	Return to D'Ennery; Rain	28
	Pocomania	31
	Parang	33
	Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire	35
	Orient and Immortal Wheat	36
	A Lesson for This Sunday	38
	Bleecker Street, Summer	40
	A Letter from Brooklyn	41
	Brise Marine	43
	A Sea-Chantey	44
	The Polish Rider	47
	The Banyan Tree, Old Year's Night	48
	In a Green Night	50
	Islands	52
	from The Castaway and Other Poems [1965]
	The Castaway	57
	The Swamp	59
	Tarpon	61
	Missing the Sea	63
	The Glory Trumpeter	64
	A Map of Europe	66
	Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain	67
	Crusoe's Island	68
	Coral	73
	from The Gulf [1970]
	from The Castaway and Other Poems (1965)
	The Flock	77
	A Village Life	79
	Goats and Monkeys	83
	Laventille	85
	Verandah	89
	God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen	91
	Crusoe's Journal	92
	Lampfall	95
	Codicil	97
	from The Gulf and Other Poems (1969)
	Mass Man	99
	Exile	100
	Homage to Edward Thomas	103
	The Gulf	104
	Elegy	109
	Blues	111
	Air	113
	Guyana	115
	Che	123
	Negatives	124
	Landfall, Grenada	125
	Homecoming: Anse La Raye	127
	Star	130
	Cold Spring Harbor	131
	Love in the Valley	133
	Nearing Forty	136
	The Walk	138
	Another Life [1973]
1	The Divided Child	143
2	Homage to Gregorias	189
3	A Simple Flame	223
4	The Estranging Sea	259
	from Sea Grapes [1976]
	Sea Grapes	297
	Sunday Lemons	298
	New World	300
	Adam's Song	302
	Preparing for Exile	304
	Names	305
	Sainte Lucie	309
	Volcano	324
	Endings	326
	The Fist	327
	Love after Love	328
	Dark August	329
	Sea Canes	331
	Midsummer, Tobago	333
	Oddjob, a Bull Terrier	334
	Winding Up	336
	The Morning Moon	338
	To Return to the Trees	339
	from the Star-Apple Kingdom [1979]
	The Schooner Flight	345
	Sabbaths, W.I.	362
	The Sea Is History	364
	Egypt, Tobago	368
	The Saddhu of Couva	372
	Forest of Europe	375
	Koenig of the River	379
	The Star-Apple Kingdom	383
	from the Fortunate Traveller [1981]
	Old New England	399
	Upstate	401
	Piano Practice	403
	North and South	405
	Beachhead	410
	Map of the New World	413
	From This Far	414
	Europa	418
	The Man Who Loved Islands	420
	Hurucan	423
	Jean Rhys	427
	The Liberator	430
	The Spoiler's Return	432
	The Hotel Normandie Pool	439
	Early Pompeian	446
	Easter	452
	Wales	455
	The Fortunate Traveller	456
	The Season of Phantasmal Peace	464
	from Midsummer [1984]
	II - Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome	469
	III - At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms	471
	VI - Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn	472
	VII - Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains	474
	XI - My double, tired of morning, closes the door	475
	XIV - With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin	476
	XV - I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide	477
	XVIII - In the other'eighties, a hundred midsummers gone	478
	XIX - Gauguin	479
	XX - Watteau	481
	XXI - A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table	482
	XXIII - With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings	483
	XXV - The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta	484
	XXVI - Before that thundercloud breaks from its hawsers	485
	XXVII - Certain things here are quietly American-	486
	XXVIII - Something primal in our spine makes the child swing	488
	XXX - Gold dung and urinous straw from the horse garages	489
	XXXIII - Those grooves in that forehead of sand-coloured flesh	490
	XXXV - Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger	491
	XXXVI - The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines	492
	XXXIX - The grey English road hissed emptily under the tires	493
	XLI - The camps hold their distance-brown chestnuts and grey smoke	494
	XLII - Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland	495
	XLIII - Tropic Zone	496
	XLIX - A wind-scraped headland, a sludgy, dishwater sea	503
	L - I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells	504
	LI - Since all of your work was really an effort to appease	505
	LII - I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head	506
	LIII - There was one Syrian, with his bicycle, in our town	508
	LIV - The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me	510
	Books of Poetry by Derek Walcott	512
	Index of Titles	513

Editorial Reviews

One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book.” —Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe

“It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who—without ever betraying his native sources—has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature.” —Peter Balakian, Poetry

From the Publisher

Walcott has written nine books of poetry, beginning with 25 Poems (printed in St. Lucia in 1948) and ending with Midsummer ( LJ 1/84). In Collected Poems , Walcott offers us generous selections from all his books, especially Sea Grapes ( LJ 8/76), and he adds the entire text of Another Life (1974), his autobiography in verse and a tribute to the formative influences of the island of St. Lucia. Walcott is a superb stylist who leaves his signature in complex chains of imagery: ``The rain falls like knives/ on the kitchen floor./ The sky's heavy drawer was pulled out too suddenly.'' Collected Poems will certainly rank as one of the important poetry titles of 1986, and no poetry collection will be complete without it. Strongly recommended. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

Library Journal