Terada describes this approach as one of the most ancient and critical oppositions in Western culture. She considers the ways in which Walcott's poetry, written from this ambiguous vantage point, illuminates the relationship of American poetry to Old World culture, as well as the ways in which American languages relate to one another and to the material world. While mimetic theories of art hold that culture is a representation of something original (nature), Walcott's does not. Thus, he must re-examine the relationship between culture and nature. Beginning broadly with Walcott's mental map of the world, Terada demonstrates how his "geographic imagination" is played out in Omeros. She goes on to explore Walcott's unusual openness to his poetic precursors, among them Homer, Beaudelaire, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Lowell, which for some critics is as problematic as his adoption of the creoles and dialects of the Caribbean.
A collection spanning the range of the writer's career includes his first published poem, his celebrated verses on violence in Africa, his mature work from "The Star-Apple Kingdom, " and his late masterpieces from "White Egrets."
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century—a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and—perhaps most surprisingly—getting older.
Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work. Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his later major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.
Derek Walcott was aptly described by Laurence Liberman in The Yale Review as "one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day." Sea Grapes deepens with this major poet's search for true images of the post-Adamic "new world"--especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott's rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets--Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda. On the publication of Selected Poems in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, "Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries." This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott's mastery. He is also the author of The Gulf, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, and Another Life.
?An important contribution to the study of Walcott?s poetry and plays.??Modernism/modernity ?Walcott, [Burnett] says, has assimilated western tradition to his own project, using it to create a new plural world of open-ended possibilities. . . . A book that should be of interest to any student of Walcott?s literature.??Times Higher Education Supplement ?This ambitious book takes in the full corpus of Walcott?plays, essays, interviews, etc., as well as the poetry?and argues the essential unity of his (humanistic) vision.??Wasafiri ?Burnett is very good on Walcott?s aesthetic and technical strategies, particularly the mythopoeic framework of his thought, and the epic form which he frequently employs.??New West Indian Guide ?Convincingly suggests that Walcott?s art radiates outward from St. Lucia to the West Indies, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Americas, becoming an art that honors and enlarges the English language and its multiple histories and usages.??World Literature Today
From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart "Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound; my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write, paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover a detail--"a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound"--of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.
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."
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In this book of poems, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.