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Overview
Drawing from every stage of the Nobel laureate's career, Derek 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 latest 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.
Synopsis
Drawing from every stage of the Nobel laureate's career, Derek 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 latest 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.
The New York Times - William Logan
Walcott has captured his islands with a lushness and richness rare in our poetry - the outposts of empire once seemed as strange as Kipling's India or Bishop's Brazil. If air travel has brought them closer, it has brought their tragedies closer as well. No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered. For more than half a century he has served as our poet of exile - a man almost without a country, unless the country lies wherever he has landed, in flight from himself.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"The magnitude of Walcott's achievement . . . is on lavish display in his updated Selected Poems, which spans a half-century of his protean output and highlights the formal prowess of the progressively ambitious work he's produced over the last twenty years . . . confirming the incantatory powers of an oracle the likes of which the New World hasn't seen since Prospero drowned his book." —David Barber, The Boston Globe "Selected Poems allows us the rare pleasure of tracing a long career, a full life . . . Timeless in [its] magic and cumulative power . . . Luminous [and] engaging." —Richard Wakefield, The Seattle TimesWilliam Logan
Walcott has captured his islands with a lushness and richness rare in our poetry — the outposts of empire once seemed as strange as Kipling’s India or Bishop’s Brazil. If air travel has brought them closer, it has brought their tragedies closer as well. No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered. For more than half a century he has served as our poet of exile — a man almost without a country, unless the country lies wherever he has landed, in flight from himself.— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
This career-spannning retrospective, culled from nearly 50 years of work, will go a long way toward reminding readers of the breadth and depth of Nobel laureate Walcott's achievement. Though he is perhaps best known for his modern epic, Omeros, which tells a Homeric tale set in St. Lucia, Walcott is a fine lyric poet as well, writing in traditional forms and meters as well as in powerful free verse. Alongside the epic tone that he brought into modern verse—"I sing of Achille, Afolabe's son,/ who never ascended in an elevator"—is lustful writing about a woman humming Bob Marley on a bus, a casual description of being mugged in Greenwich Village or a painter's-eye view of a fish. The political Walcott is also here; observing a crowd listening to a politician, he writes, "Who will name this silence/ respect? Those forced, hoarse hosannas/ awe?" The lyric Walcott is well represented, but the long poems—which are necessarily excerpted—prove more problematic. At best, the editor can hope that readers, hooked by one of these narrative poems, will be compelled to seek out the complete version. Nonetheless, this book represents a milestone in the career of a major writer. (Jan.)
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