Collected Poems, 1948-1984

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Description

This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

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Customer Reviews

Collected Poems 1848-1984
I read a poem in O'magazine a few years ago and was in the process of throwing out some magazines for recycling and thought I'd better look through them and see if I should re-read any of the articles. When I got to the poem, titled Love After Love I just stopped. I couldn't believe that I had only breezed through it and put it aside. I tore the page out of the magazine and also made copies. I LOVED THIS POEM!! It did something to me when I read it,.. and I can read it over and over again and get the same feeling. I finally decided to google the author and locate the poem. Amazon.com had tons of info and the book, so I bought it and I never buy anything online. This book has been worth it. Every poem is simply incredible, but my favorite will always be 'Love After Love'.

2010-07-29 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Sand and the sound of the waves.
When you read Derek Walcott you cannot help but be dragged into his world. It is not a world where you sit on the beach, drink a beer and listen to Jimmy Buffett all day.

Instead, it is a world where life is hard. You live in a place where nature is indeed beautiful but at times unforgiving. The sun cooks you, the sand chafes you and the water drains you.

In this book of collected poems, Walcott has some of his more famous poems along with relatively unknown ones. Some are like the Iliad, some are strange and need deep introspection. Either way, they all touch some part of your psyche. It is obvious that he has won so many prizes for his work, least of all the Nobel Prize. It is accessible and deep all at the same time.

Good poets guide us in the story, we take what we can and allow ourselves to open up and understand the beauty of the work. Walcott is a master of the tour.
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Excerpt from "Egypt, Tobago"

There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.

Numb Antony, in the torpor
stretching her inert
sex near him like a sleeping cat,
knows his heart is the real desert.

Over the dunes
of her heaving,
to his heart's drumming
fades the mirage of the legions,

across love-tousled sheets,
the triremes fading.
Ar the carved door of her temple
a fly wrings its message.

He brushes a damp hair
away from an ear
as perfect as a sleeping child's.
He stares, inert, the fallen column.

He lies like a copper palm
tree at three in the afternoon
by a hot sea
and a river, in Egypt, Tobago

Her salt marsh dries in the heat
where he foundered
without armor.
He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,

the uproar of arenas,
the changing surf
of senators, for
this silent ceiling over silent sand -

this grizzled bear, whose fur,
moulting, is silvered -
for this quick fox with her
sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,

his head
is in Egypt, his feet
in Rome, his groin a desert
trench with its dead soldier.

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Highly recommended.

Thank you for reading my review.

2010-05-27 | Geekasaurus Rex (Rochester, New York) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A true Caribbean Genius
...i firmly believe he has reperesented the caribbean in a way no- one has ever done before. Derek Walcott's diction and his superb metaphors are yet to be seen in any other caribbean poet. Yet, like the jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley, Walcott has used his art in such a way that the whole world can identify with his work. His development of major themes such as alienation and cultural identity, Caribbean history , society and development and the pOst colonial era truly represents the region in a realistic way. His poems are truly inspirational and representative of the Caribbean. Walcott's poems are a reseviour for any historian who wishes to know about the history of the Caribbean. One shoud note that Walcott has not only used the english language in his poems but he has created the rhyme and rhythm in such a way to achieve a Caribbean creole(See "Parades Parades"), thus firmly establishing his identity as a caribbean poet and writer.IN CONCLUSION, Walcott is a true genius and we in the caribbean are proud of him.

2001-04-04 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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He didn't win a Nobel Prize for nothing
This cool dude uses language in a way no one else does. He redefines syntax, conventions, the way words are placed together, and forms a new interpretation of phrase-synthesis I can't even begin to describe. Actually, I will. There's lots of surrealism here, but not just for its own sake. There's deep philosophy here too. The sombering tones give the incredulous imagery and abstractionistic logic (this guy's a hard read, as it says in the preface) and language that makes him something like a Sylvia Plath in tuxedo, but with a much wider-spanning genius that gives his poetry a greater variety of elements and vocabulary, and with better breaks and sense of poetic rhythm.

2000-01-02 | Michael (Michael) | Helpful Votes: 18 | Rating: 5

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Walcott's Incomparable Command of the English Language
One cannot recommend this book too highly. It is a certain classic for scores of generations to come. Derek Walcott IS the Carribean. His poems enrich the reader's sense of the Carribean without ever over-sentimentalizing. Walcott's keen observations heighten the familiar, while at times domesticating the exotic. His poem "The Spoiler's Return" is equally humorous and disturbing, as it adresses the social problems of the Carribean, and is best appreciated when read with a Carribean accent. His lines ebb and flow like a tide, but always draw you in and never disappoint. Must read poems of his: "Codicil", "The Spoiler's Return", "LI" (from the Midsummer collection), "The Schooner Flight", "The Fortunate Traveller". If you buy one collection of English poetry published after WWII, this should be the book you purchase. No one alive can make the English language work as powerfully and brilliantly for him/her as Derek Walcott can.

1999-03-28 | Helpful Votes: 15 | Rating: 5

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Omeros

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• ISBN13: 9780374523503
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Description

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

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Creating an epic poem based on Homer and Odysseus seems a risky proposition for a modern poet, but Derek Walcott accomplishes the feat with stunning results in Omeros. The title, which is Homer's name in Greek, nods to the wandering and exile of the great poet himself, who learned and suffered while traveling. From there, Walcott takes off to "see the cities of many men and to know their minds." After an exhilarating exploration of tremendous proportions, we learn of the past and the present and ride along the rhythm of the words of Walcott in this amazing text.

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Customer Reviews

classical poetry in our contemporary world
It is an all too uncommon delight to read a contemporary work that contains all the greatness of classical literature, that deserves to be shelved beside Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante. This is such a work. An epic poem that lavishes in the power and stunning beauty of words and images, utterly striking poetry as a mix of classical and modernist literature, reflecting the process of the mind and the process of the literary history. This wonderful poetry, some of the best I've ever read, is used to capture the land and peoples of St. Lucia. The action concerns two men, Achille and Hector, that fight an epic war for the affection of Helen. Woven into the tale, besides the stunning poetry, is the clashing of the races, the condition of the native peoples of the Americas, the nature of war, no longer for women, but for land and national pride. Fascinating epic poetry with stunning imagery of a classical world mixed with our own. The American epic poem. Grade: A

2009-08-15 (Vermont) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Wonderful
This richly allusive poem is an exploration of the colonial experience, primarily from the viewpoint of the dispossessed. While based in Walcott's native St. Lucia, the poem ranges across North America and Europe, and draws on a rich literary heritage. While not strictly speaking an epic by traditional standards, Omeros is epic in scope and ambition. Most of Walcott's characters, including an autobiographical narrator, are individuals in search of a home. The poem itself is an effort to reconcile both the European tradition with the experience of dispossession and enslavement. Walcott calls on Homer, Milton, Joyce, the history of St. Lucia, and many other resources to produce this impressive poem. Walcott's ability to vary his poetry and language across the whole length of the poem is impressive. Parts are intensely lyrical, others witty. The descriptive writing is often superb. A number of sequences, for example, the opening section and the dream voyage of one character to his ancestral Africa are stunning.

2008-11-09 (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Epic
Exploring the relationships between natives, tourists, and nature, Walcott moves beyond just our relationships with one another to create this modern epic. Evocative of the Iliad with its battles between Hector and Achille over the yellow-dressed Helen, Omeros moves beyond just the interactions of the natives to greater themes.

There are many exciting parts to the poem: the beauty of the language, the themes, that it was only on the second time reading Omeros that I realized it rhymed, such is the seeming effortlessness with which Walcott writes. It is a modern epic for the way it is able to really explore human relationships with one another, with the trees, with people invading our indigenous societies.

Walcott manages to focus on a few people in spite of the seemingly huge scope of Omeros, and this makes the book much more deeply enjoyable. I recommend it heartily.

2005-03-14 | Displaced midwesterner (Stanford) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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Postcolonial Homer
Walcott confidently feels his way into epic form, borrowing the blind eyes of Homer and tropes from Homer's tales. Jam-packed with craft, OMEROS' Dantesque tercets make hairpin turns on the pinpoints of vowels and consonants. Walcott is nothing if not evocative, calling forth the spirits of breadfruit, waves, Plains Indians, sunken treasure, sea creatures and all his other muses with a music that is beyond sounds.

For all the great poetry, what fans of the modern epic will miss in OMEROS is a narrative through-line. Structurally, it is more like William Carlos Williams' PATERSON or especially Hart Crane's THE BRIDGE, than like THE ILLIAD or THE ODYSSEY. The stories in the poem are given secondary importance to the ideas. While I will not disagree with other reviewers' characterizations of the characters as 'well-developed,' I will say that Walcott gives his characters very little to do. The greatest journey is the one taken by the un-named narrator (who seems to be prowling the University Poet circuit from the Carribean to the U.S. to England). Those who want a story with their modern epic are directed to THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER by James Merrill.

What Walcott offers in place of narrative is recollections, meditations and essays on a post-colonial world. Certain human motifs are bound to repeat, he says, and demonstrates with the story of fishermen Hector and Achille fighting for the island girl in the yellow dress, Helen. To me, Omeros is really a collection of poems in a similar form spiralling around similar themes, taking up each others' melodies in different keys. Like any symphony, it sometimes gets lost. But its individual passages are, more often than not, magnificent -- and beautiful to hear.

2004-01-06 | John Ott (Los Angeles, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 21 | Rating: 4

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The worst poem it has ever been my fire's misfortune to burn
Why is it not possible to bestow 0 stars upon an item? I cannot express deeply enough how horrible this 320-some-odd-page poem is. It is the longest complaint I have ever had to trudge through. That is all it is. One long list of complaints. All the narrator does throughout the piece is whine about the same things. A repetative compliation of meaningless and monotonous rants about where he belongs in life, and what makes them so tedious is the fact that you can never relate to the man, so there is no way to feel remorse. I will admit that there are some eloquent descriptions and very mild humour, but it is not enough to save this tragically wordy, muddled, vague, boring, unoriginal, god-please-take-me-now tribute to an overrated classics writer. Save yourself the long nights and headaches....Stay far, far away!

2003-12-09 | Helpful Votes: 14 | Rating: 1

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Selected Poems

Description

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Customer Reviews

Superb
This really is a wonderful anthology. Baugh is to be congratulated for his selection of Walcott poems. What is most impressive about this book is the remarkable consistency of superb and characteristic poetry from the beginnings of Walcott's career to more recent work. The themes of exile, Walcott's ambivalent relationship with the European canon, and the nature of colonialism run throughout the work. Much of this work is autobiographical, presenting Walcott's remarkable ability to translate personal experience into beautiful language and universal themes.

2009-01-03 (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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GREAT!
I love Derek Walcott, and this is the best collection of his poetry I've ever seen. Amazing editing.

2007-02-19 | college student (Boston, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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White Egrets: Poems

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• ISBN13: 9780374289294

Description

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Customer Reviews

More Wonderful Poetry
Walcott is now 80 and while this may not be last verse we get from him, it is unlikely there will be much more to come. These short poems are uniformly excellent to outstanding and display many of Walcott's greatest qualities. The powerful imagery, his superb ability to evoke landscapes, his deep knowledge of the Western canon, and the often striking combination of nature imagery and psychological insight. Many of Walcott's favorite themes recur in these poems. His love of his native St. Lucia, the nature of colonialism, the power of the Western canon, and the glories of landscapes. Added to these themes are some strongly elegiac elements including several memorial poems for old friends and meditations on aging and approaching mortality. The image of white egrets recurs in several poems, used to denote permanent features of the natural world but also symbolic of language and art. Different readers will have different favorites. There is a particularly powerful poem dedicated to President Obama, an incredible compliment for a politician. The final poem in this book is a gentle and remarkably evocative meditation on mortality, the nature of art, and Walcott's love for St. Lucia. A just conclusion.

2010-08-28 (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Driving Vessel
Perhaps, because I looked so hard through the slapping growth
(for like and kind). Maybe it's caused by any growth made while
the slaps were sent, received, that a sense of the sort
beyond greatness in the work of this very fallible is met.
Mind these not. From your sitting stand, read and decide.
But for me, reading Mr. Walcott here in his humble (however got)
honest, has set revelation lengths ahead of ego its foe,
and caused what is post below.


DRIVING VESSEL

Be a man of projects. - Scribe Ani

In double harness, wonder a plague,
he crossed the threshold of eighty and asked,
three years back in his Sea-Change,
whether he (and at himself he laughed)
would become Superman at seventy-seven.
Body, ship of state to rend and break;
closed for repair, rest, nutrition,
and the ancient's second medicine, exercise
award greatness the wreath and dodge of attack.
Each hand captains their driving vessel,
Nestor in the cart with Diomedes at a hundred.
All who on this eye, mouth planet, walked, stooped,
hewed, and drove from before Abram through
to a fighter in New York or a diver in Japan.
`must do more than when they were young,'

I think of those two Athenians, in (their) Politeias
who quote another:
"When a man no longer has to work for a living,
he should practice excellence."
"Eat less and leap more," Rabelais has
the peasant ass say to the dandy, court horse.
And my own tall sire only gave in when stranded,
garage-less in his Purgatory at eighty,
final sleep coming six to seven years on,
and still more man than many.
A superman at eighty? Life puts legs to it!

© Copyright 2010 (17 April-03 June) Joseph Duvernay

2010-06-03 | public trust (Frazier Park, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Beautifully written and touching
I adore Derek Walcott. This book requires rereading to understand, and STILL is more veiled and subtle than his previous books.This is a poignant and touching goodbye to the world as he experienced it. He's old, he's ill, he's waiting for death, and he is grieving the loss of a relationship.

2010-05-26 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Compelling Read!
In White Egrets his expressions drip with candor. It is clear that he represents the pulse of Caribbean poetry. He speaks so eloquently about his West Indian existence. "There never really was a `we' or `ours' whatever each enjoyed was separate."


In White Egrets he has allowed the reader to travel around the world with him and you move to the rhythm, rhyme of his poetry. White Egrets is soaked in imagery, including the paintings of "Frans, Hals,and Rembrandt." One can metaphorically hear the sounds of this book as his depth details is compelling, original and his observations are sparkling. This book is a composition of varying lengths. He puts his feelings into words as he expresses himself with his own inner voice which for him is a natural beat, as he is unconcerned about the prospect of human opinion or annihilation.


He is an honest poet as he questions his permanent value, he wonders if he has lost his gift of poetry he wonders if his "gift has withered" but one thing he clearly states and concedes in White Egrets is that if he has truly lost his gift he should grateful. He says "be grateful that you wrote well in this place." I hope this is not his last. White Egrets is a must have for any library and great gift. White Egrets for me is perfection in its raw form, time indeed as inflicted him with wisdom.

Brenda McCartney
[...]

2010-05-14 (Bahamas) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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egrets and regrets
Derek Walcott is one of the finest poets of the last 50 years. His command of the English language is astonishing (hawks sitting on the wrist of a branch), his images are unforgettable (the heart that returns like the waves splashing against the rocks), his touches are heart-breaking. There are influences of a European culture that has now gone beyond the English culture so dear to Walcott. His waves' image reminds me of Rebora at his best (E giunge l'onda, ma non giunge il mare...). White Egrets is not a book you should devour. It is a book one should read slowly, one poem each night, to savour and to remuginate about. It is the book of an old poet who has made peace with his troubled soul and finally accepts his life for whatever it has been. It reminds me of what one of my teachers used to say, that God gave us memories so the we may have roses in December. Walcott has egrets, white egrets.....

2010-05-04 (Ardmore, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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The Prodigal: A Poem

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• ISBN13: 9780374530167
• Brainwash: New

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Customer Reviews

A flock of commas
In the "Prodigal", the noble poet luareate, Walcott proves again
he is a man of humble proportion with grand perspective. This landscape of memory lives in poignant hues. His flock of commas soar across stanzas of history. In the color nuiance, he bares his painted soul, so we may grow.

2004-11-03 | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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Tiepolo's Hound

Description

From the Nobel laureate, a "resplently luminous" (Paul Gray, Time) 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 foundits image again, a hound in astounding light.Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris. The poet himself hunts for 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-six of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-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.

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Customer Reviews

The Painting
For reference, the white hound may be the one found in "Finding the Moses" by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. See also youtube's "Tiepolo's Hound: A Reading by Derek Walcott".

2008-04-26 | Michael (Michael) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Tiepolo's Hound
With so many wondrous works, it is tempting to take Walcott's poetic virtuosity for granted. Of them all, this is my favorite, and this one features his virtuosity at its most shining. His effortlessly rhyming couplets sing themes of painting and poetry, biography and myth, existential pain and release,geography and spirit. And Pissarro the painter is duly celebrated.

2005-12-26 | wisdomlacker | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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"Coffee-table poetry and art"
Derek Walcott has always confessed his ambitions to be a painter of note.While poetry became his favourite wife, his love for painting never disappeared. Over the years he has continued to paint, and his art now decorates the covers of his poetry collections. "Tiepolo's Hound" seems one of the least personal of Walcott's books. While we get glimpses of the poet's life, he is more concerned to explore the life of Camille Pisarro to understand the heart of the individual bound to the calling of artist. It seems a tentative, searching exploration.Obviously identifying with their common Caribbean childhood and the influences of landscape and history they share, Walcott tries to see into the complex struggles of this artist who left the Caribbean for Paris, to become one of the fathers of impressionism.Seeking his epiphanic hound,he shares with us the painters who excited his artistic inspiration. Alongside his rhyming couplets he has placed twenty six of his own paintings-some very good, others less so.It is rare to find a book like this, coffetable poetry and art together by the same artist. Now seventy, this Nobel Laureate is not afraid to share his meditations on art and poetry-through art and poetry-warts and all.A collector's item.Walcott's readers must be patient with him, and try to go with him as he charts, quite bravely,his questionings of the artist's commitment and the cost."Whatever the age is, it lies in the small spring of poetry everywhere"(p66).A defining comment.Read "poetry" as the very heart of all art.

2000-05-12 (Castries, Saint Lucia, West Indies (Eastern Caribbean)) | Helpful Votes: 16 | Rating: 5

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