Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells
into a village; she assumes the impenetrable
musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat,
...
This coral's hape ecohes the hand
It hollowed. Its
Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,
...
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.
...
Man, I suck me tooth when I hear
How dem croptime fiddlers lie,
And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutes
That bring water to me eye!
...
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
...
There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
...
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
...
There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.
...
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
...
You can't put in the ground swell of the organ
from the Christiansted, St.Croix, Anglican Church
behind the paratrooper's voice: 'Turned cop
after Vietnam. I made thirty jumps.'
...
Koening knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles
...
Better a jungle in the head
than rootless concrete.
Better to stand bewildered
by the fireflies' crooked street;
...
As for that other thing
which comes when the eyelid is glazed
and the wax gleam
from the unwrinkled forehead
...
Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday,
in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping
those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore
...
When sunset, a brass gong,
vibrate through Couva,
is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,
like a white cattle bird growing more small
...
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
...
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
...
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago's highways. The first breeze
...
Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah's elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto
...
Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was a Caribbean poet and playwright who was born on the island of Saint Lucia. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. Walcott's work often explored themes of colonialism, race, and identity, and he drew heavily on the history and culture of the Caribbean in his writing. He first gained international recognition with his poetry collection, "In a Green Night," which was published in 1962. In addition to his work as a poet, Walcott was also a successful playwright, and his plays were produced in theaters around the world. He was known for his powerful and lyrical language, his exploration of complex and challenging themes, and his commitment to the cultural and political liberation of the Caribbean. Throughout his life, Walcott received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He remained active as a writer and educator until his death in 2017. Today, Walcott's legacy as a poet and playwright continues to inspire and challenge readers and artists around the world. His work has had a profound impact on Caribbean literature and culture, and he is remembered as a visionary who helped to shape the literary and cultural identity of the Caribbean and beyond.
He is an ex-British colony member who was growing up on the isolated volcanic island. These issues have had a strong impact on Walcott’s life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His mother ran the town’s Methodist school. And his father, a Bohemian watercolourist died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. Walcott arrived to Trinidad in 1953 after studying at St. Mary's College on his native island and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He has worked as a theatrical and art critic. With 25 Poetry, he made his debut at the age of 18, but In a Green Night, a book of poems, was his breakthrough (1962). He formed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which staged several of his early works. He has traveled extensively over the world, yet he has always felt profoundly anchored in Caribbean civilization, with its cultural blend of African, Asian, and European aspects, not least in his efforts to establish an indigenous play. He has split his time for many years between Trinidad, where he works as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.
1969 Cholmondeley Award 1971 Obie Award for Dream on Monkey Mountain 1972 OBE 1981 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship OBIE ("genius award") 1988 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 1990 Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize 1990 WH Smith Literary Award for Omeros 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature 2008 Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for White Egrets 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for White Egrets)
Night In The Gardens Of Port Of Spain
Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells
into a village; she assumes the impenetrable
musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat,
her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells,
coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon.
Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.
Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street,
a surf of sailor's faces crest, is gone
with the sea's phosphoresence; the boites-de-nuit
tinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.
Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons,
she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch oil flare
toward white stars, like cities, flashing neon,
burning to be the bitch she must become.
As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril
of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.
I've only just discovered Derek Walcott and it is such a pleasure to come across a poet of this calibre that I haven't read before. I don't understand half of it - but that's half the wonder of it!
i think its great that you guys have all of these poets on here because i had an english clkass project on poets and i wanted to do a west indian poet because i am from the west indies..
A Far Cry From Africa is one of the best Caribbean poems I have ever read. It expresses in words, my thoughts about our Caribbean ancestral background. Dereck Walcott inspires me with his amazing writing style and I believe that his work is a marvelous accomplishment.
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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
I must say that Derek Walcott unlocks a different door in Caribbean poetry. Not only does he expose our history and heritage but he does so with an ornate yet down-to-earth artisitc style. I have studied Olive Senior and Martin Carter not to mention his greatest 'oponent' Edward Brathwaite and somehow Walcott's poems tend to offer a more captivating appeal.