Items related to The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
A collection spanning the range of the Nobel Prize-winning writer's career includes his first published poem, "In My Eighteenth Year"; his first widely celebrated verses on the violence in Africa; his mature work from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces from White Egrets. 10,000 first printing.
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"Derek Walcott is a natural poet . . . The writing leaves merelyricism far behind and rises to the level of prophetic speech, as in theextraordinary poem 'The Season of Phantasmal Peace.' . . . Walcott has fewequals in the use of metaphor. In his imagination, each thing seems to belinked to another by a special bond, unapparent until he points it out, permanently fresh once he does. . . . [A] largehearted and essential book." --TejuCole, The New York Times Book Review
"Language becomes a means of mastering [Walcott's] surroundings, enabling him to gain an almost magical power over the elements; language is more real to him than reality itself . . . Perhaps no poet since Tennyson has created the kind of rapt verbal spell that Walcott can produce . . . Yet Walcott's style . . . is also unmistakably of twentieth-century vintage . . . Its modernity lies in the extraordinary freedom of Walcott's images, which go beyond mixed metaphor to achieve a kind of synesthesia . . . Walcott [gives] us not merely what is seen but the rhythm of seeing itself." --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 . . . This volume serves as a reminder of a great poet, whose life has been as vast as his work." --The Economist
"Derek Walcott's poems are preeminent in our language for the way they consistently represent the mingled heritage of fractured lives and the fractured languages of the Caribbean. More, they define the peculiar mix of grandeur and imprisonment. He mastered the colonizer's language to make an un-colonized utterance. His poems illustrate a useful, necessary, and yes, original foundational trust in elementary European poetic forms. And, finally, they represent an elegant murmur against history's violent narrative of bondage--an expression that favors writing honestly in a shared world language about the struggles of the men and women of the Antilles and beyond." --David Biespiel, The Rumpus
"In celebrating his native island, Walcott . . . celebrates all lives lived far from metropolitan centres of influence. We discover how deliberate, indeed strategic, this celebration is in the periodic comparisons poems such as The Prodigal make between European high art and the poet's own 'unimportantly beautiful' village. Though he chooses formal and grammatical structures other than the folk oral tradition, and rarely writes in dialect, this poet is neither apolitical nor colonial apologist . . . An occasion to remind us what an astonishing poet Walcott is." --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
"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 . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott is the most thorough single-volume selection of the poet's work to date . . . There is nothing equal to this body of work anywhere else in literature: a chronicle of the effects of colonialism so torn that its love and hate for its origins must be expressed in equal measure." --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 . . . In love with the bounty of language, his poetry soars beyond the blandness of blank verse. He excels at rhetorical flourishes, from expansive, epic stanzas to taut, rhymed quatrains . . . It is hard to imagine this giant of letters not writing again. The world would be a much poorer place. A light would go out in our collective soul." --Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle
"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 . . . " --Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle
The must-have Derek Walcott collection, encompassing all of his best-known and most popular poems.
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- PublisherFarrar Straus & Giroux
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 0374535086
- ISBN 13 9780374535087
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages640
- EditorMaxwell Glyn
- Rating
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