The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013

"Praise for ""The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013"" ""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 . . . Walcott pays indefatigable attention to the look of things, and writes with a spendthrift approach to the word-hoard . . . He [brings] 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 . . . The writing leaves mere lyricism far behind and rises to the level of prophetic speech, as in the extraordinary poem 'The Season of Phantasmal Peace.' One inescapable conclusion from reading hundreds of pages of Walcott at once is the feeling that this is the lifework of an ecstatic . . . Walcott has few equals in the use of metaphor. In his imagination, each thing seems to be linked to another by a special bond, unapparent until he points it out, permanently fresh once he does. Most of these metaphors he uses just once, brilliantly, discarding them in the onrush of description . . . The reader imagines Walcott, as he sets these striking images down, mentally shuttling between the fact of the world and the fact of the poem. Often, he is evoking the sea's activity, or the sky's, and making analogies with his own practice of describing it. And so it is that on the last poem on the last page of this largehearted and essential book, the two realities finally merge. The natural poet dissolves, astonished, into nature, 'as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes / white again and the book comes to a close.'"" --Teju Cole, ""The New York Times Book Review""""""The Poetry of Derek Walcott"""