The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

by Derek Walcott, Glyn Maxwell (Editor)

Overview

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 received: 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 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537579
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(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.

Glyn Maxwell has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets. He has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as being shortlisted three times for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Three of his books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems was published last year. Many of his plays have been staged in London and New York. They include The Lifeblood, which was British Theatre Guide’s ‘Best Play on the Fringe’ at Edinburgh in 2004, Broken Journey and The Only Girl in the World (both Time Out Critics’ Choices). Oberon Books publishes his Plays One (The Lifeblood, The Only Girl in the World and Wolfpit), Plays Two (Broken Journey, Best Man Speech and The Last Valentine), The Forever Waltz, Liberty, After Troy, Merlin and the Woods of Time and the libretti The Lion’s Face and Seven Angels.

Table of Contents

From 25 Poems (1949)

The Fishermen Rowing Homeward . . . 3

In My Eighteenth Year 4

Private Journal 5

Letter to a Painter in England 6

A City's Death by Fire 8

As John top Patmos 9

I with Legs Crossed Along the Daylight Watch 10

From Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949) Canto II 13

From Poems (1957)

The Dormitory 19

To Nigel 20

Hart Crane 21

The Sisters of Saint Joseph 22

Kingston-Nocturne 23

From in a Green Night (1948-60)

A Far Cry from Africa 27

Runis of a Great House 29

Tales of the Islands 31

Return to Dennery, Rain 37

Pocomania 40

Parang 42

A Careful Passion 43

A Letter from Brooklyn 45

Brise Marine 47

Anadyomene 48

A Sea-Chantey 49

In a Green Night 52

Islands 54

From the Castaway (1965)

The Castaway 57

The Swamp 59

A Village Life 61

A Tropical Bestiary 64

Goats and Monkeys 69

Veranda 71

Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain 73

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen 74

Crusoe's Journal 75

Crusoe's Island 78

Codicil 83

From the Gulf (1969)

The Corn Goddess 87

From Metamorphoses: Moon 88

Junta 89

Mass Man 91

Miramar 92

Exile 93

The Train 96

Homage to Edward Thomas 97

The Gulf 98

Elegy 102

Blues 104

Air 106

Che 108

Negatives 109

Homecoming: Anse La Raye 110

The Cell 112

Star 113

Love in the Valley 114

The Walk 116

Hic Jacet 117

From Another Life (1973)

From Book I: The Divided Child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 121

From Book II: Homage to Gregorias: 8 151

From Book III: A Simple Flame: 14, 15 158

From Book IV: The Estranging Sea: 20, 21, 22, 23 170

From sea Grapes (1976)

Sea Grapes 197

Adam's Song 198

Party Night at the Hilton 199

The Lost Federation 200

Parades, Parades 202

Dread Song 204

Names 207

Sainte Lucie 211

Ohio, Winter 224

The Chelsea 225

Love After Love 227

Dark August 228

The Harvest 229

Midsummer, Tobago 230

To Return to the Trees 231

From the Star-Apple Kingdom (1979)

The Schooner Flight 237

The Sea Is History 253

Egypt, Tobago 257

R.T.S.L. 261

Rorest of Europe 263

Koening of the River 266

The Star-Apple Kingdom 270

From the Fortunate Traveller (1982)

Old New England 285

North and South 287

Map of the New World 292

Roman Outposts 294

Greece 295

The Man Who Loved Islands 297

Jean Rhys 300

The Spoiler's Return 303

The Hotel Normandie Pool 309

Easter 316

The Fortunate Traveller 319

The Season of Phantasmal Peace 327

From Midsummer (1984)

I "The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud-" 331

II "Companion in Rome, who Rome makes as old as Rome" 332

III "At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms" 333

IV "This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness" 334

V "The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh" 335

VI "Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn" 336

VII "Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains" 337

XIII "Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceti" 338

XIV "With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin" 339

XV "I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide" 340

XVI "So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered" 341

XVII "I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas" 342

XIX (Gauguin I and II) "On the quaus of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists" 343

XXI "A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table" 345

XXII "Rest, Christ! From tireless war. See, it's midsummer" 346

XXIII "With the Stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings" 347

XXVIII "Something primal in our spine makes the child swing" 348

XXIX "Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease" 349

XXX "Gold dung and ruinous straw from the horse garages" 350

XXXI "Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors" 351

XXXIV "Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue" 352

XXXV "Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger" 353

XXXVI "The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines" 354

XXXVIII "Autumn's music grates. From tuning forks of branches" 355

XLI "The camps hold their distance-brown chestnuts and gray smoke" 356

XLII "Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland" 357

XLVIII "Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon" 358

L "I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells" 359

LI "Since all of your work was really an effort to appease" 360

LII "I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head" 361

LIV "The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me" 362

From the Arkansas Testament (1987)

Cul de Sac Valley 365

The Three Musicians 372

Saint Lucia's First Communion 377

Gross-Ilet 378

White Magic 380

The Light of the World 382

Oceano Nox 386

To Norline 390

Winter Lamps 391

For Adrian 396

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II 398

The Arkansas Testament 400

From the Bounty (1997)

The Bounty 417

2 Signs 427

5 Parang 430

6 "It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff" 433

8 Homecoming 434

10 "New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air" 437

16 Spain 438

21 Six Fictions 441

22 "I am considering a syntax the color of slate" 446

23 "I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns" 447

26 "The sublime always begins with the chord 'And then I saw'" 448

28 "Awaking to gratitude in this generous Eden" 449

30 "The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help" 450

31 Italian Eclogues 451

32 "She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind" 456

34 "At the end of this line there is an opening door" 457

37 "After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia" 458

From Tiepolo's Hound (2000)

I "They stroll on Sundays down Dronningens Street" 461

II "What should be true of the remembered life" 468

III "Flattered by any masterful representation" 475

XX "Over the years the feast's details grew fainter" 481

XXI "Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice" 487

XXII "One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror" 493

XXIII "Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out" 499

From The Prodigal (2004)

1 "In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania" 509

2 "Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps" 515

3 "Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace" 522

4 "O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began" 528

9 "I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara" 534

11 "The dialect of the scrub in the dry season" 540

12 "Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?" 544

18 "Grass, bleached to straw on the precipices of Les Cayes" 548

From White Egrets (2010)

1 "The chessment are as rigid on their chessboard" 555

2 "Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such" 556

3 "This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels" 557

4 White Egrets 558

5 The Acacia Trees 563

6 "August, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle" 565

7 "It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest" 566

8 Sicilian Suite 567

10 In Italy 574

12 The Lost Empire 582

13 The Specter of Empire 584

14 Pastoral 587

15 A London Afternoon 588

21 A Sea-Change 590

23 "What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?" 591

24 "The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush" 592

27 Sixty Years After 593

30 "All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas" 594

32 "Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joys-" 595

33 In Amsterdam 596

39 "For the crackle and hiss of the word 'August'" 598

43 Forty Acres 599

44 "'So the world is waiting for Obama,' my barber said" 600

45 "In the leathery closeness of the car through canefields" 601

46 "Here's what that bastard calls 'the emptiness'-" 602

47 Epithalamium: The Rainy Season 603

50 Barcelona 604

52 Elegy 605

54 "This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges" 606

Index of Titles and First Lines 607

Editorial Reviews

This is poetry written with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke. Walcott's early ambition was to paint…But poetry was the deeper and more substantial practice. He brought the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems. They are great piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, often employing rhyme or slant rhyme, great layers of adjectives firming up the noun underpainting…[a] largehearted and essential book…

The New York Times Book Review - Teju Cole

Derek Walcott is a natural poet. Walcott, who turned 84 this year, began writing young. His first poem appeared in a local paper when he was 14, and his first volume, 25 Poems, was self-published when he was 18. ‘Everyone wants a prodigy to fail,' Rita Dove wrote. ‘It makes our mediocrity more bearable.' Walcott did not fail . . . ” —Teju Cole, The New York Times Book Review

“The Poetry of Derek Walcott . . . [is] a rich and beautiful new selection of [Walcott's] life's work, edited by Glyn Maxwell . . . Language becomes a means of mastering his surroundings, enabling him to gain an almost magical power over the elements; language is more real to him than reality itself . . . These magician's powers are rare enough in twentieth-century poetry. But what is even rarer than the ability is the desire to write, as Walcott does, with such abundance and felicity . . .” —Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker

“Few poets can sustain a collection spanning more than 600 pages and weighing over a kilo. Derek Walcott is one of the rare exceptions, and this is his most comprehensive anthology so far. Covering nearly seven decades, it is testament to an extraordinary talent . . .” —The Economist

“One important element of Walcott's poetry is that it's a political poetry of the anti-repressive variety. He turns what might have been natural contempt for the European marauder into exotic kind of inclusiveness. As a Caribbean man, Walcott's self-awareness—that is to say, his use of traditional poetic meters inherited from English models—helps him, over time, to produce an art that is absolute and unassailable . . ." —David Biespiel, The Rumpus

“Walcott is a generous writer in every sense. The expansive, celebratory texture of his verse is instantly recognisable. It moves with ease between city and country, between ‘the snow still falling in white words on Eighth Street' and the way ‘Sunshine […] stirs the splayed shadows of the hills like moths' . . .” —Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

“Walcott is a poet we're lucky to have writing. He is someone who has devoted his working life to art, in many senses—art as culture, art as craft and even art on canvas . . . the joy of Walcott's work is that even when he's at his most rambling, he isn't tedious. Taken as a whole, this collection gives us a kind of narrative – the story of a poet who is developing even in his eighties, sustained by faith in what poetic forms can do, and the many ways in which those forms can do it.” —Tom Payne, The Telegraph

“From his earliest poems—such as ‘In My Eighteenth Year,' written when he was that age — Walcott's voice is unornamented but carries a profound moral authority. His style is a synthesis of the influences that made the island: equal parts Shakespeare and slang. Walcott speaks ever as an outsider; the closest he gets to belonging is when he speaks for a country that is no one country . . .'” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“[Walcott's] is an associative, rich and elemental view of the world; with each new book, he stakes an ever-wider claim to authority. He remains a literary joy to savor, one of our true global treasures. Now, in his 84th year, comes The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013, an exemplary compilation of a lifetime's best poems . . .” —Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle

From the Publisher