Selected Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374531119)

Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work.

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 later 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.

Author: Derek Walcott
ISBN-10: 0374531110
ISBN-13: 9780374531119
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
Published: 12/26/2007
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 01/20/2008 pg. 24