The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
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Authors: Derek Walcott
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CONTENTS
The Fishermen Rowing Homeward â¦
Letter to a Painter in England
I with Legs Crossed Along the Daylight Watch
FROM
EPITAPH FOR THE YOUNG: XII CANTOS
(1949)
FROM
IN A GREEN NIGHT
(1948â60)
Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain
From Book I: The Divided Child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
From Book II: Homage to Gregorias: 8
From Book III: A Simple Flame: 14, 15
From Book IV: The Estranging Sea: 20, 21, 22, 23
FROM
THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM
(1979)
FROM
THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER
(1982)
The Season of Phantasmal Peace
I “The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloudâ”
II “Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome”
III “At the Queen's Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms”
IV “This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness”
V “The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh”
VI “Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn”
VII “Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains”
XIIII “Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit”
XIV “With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin”
XV “I can sense it coming from far, too, Maman, the tide”
XVI “So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered”
XVII “I pause to hear a racketing triumph of cicadas”
XIX (
Gauguin
I and II) “On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists”
XXI “A long, white, summer cloud, like a cleared linen table”
XXII “Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See, it's midsummer”
XXIII “With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings”
XXVIII “Something primal in our spine makes the child swing”
XXIX “Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease”
XXX “Gold dung and ruinous straw from the horse garages”
XXXI “Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors”
XXXIV “Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue”
XXXV “Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger”
XXXVI “The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines”
XXXVIII “Autumn's music grates. From tuning forks of branches”
XLI “The camps hold their distanceâbrown chestnuts and gray smoke”
XLII “Chicago's avenues, as white as Poland”
XLVIII “Raw ochre sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon”
L “I once gave my daughters, separately, two conch shells”
LI “Since all of your work was really an effort to appease”
LII “I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head”
LIV “The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me”
FROM
THE ARKANSAS TESTAMENT
(1987)
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen: Part II
6 “It depends on how you look at the cream church on the cliff”
10 “New creatures ease from earth, nostrils nibbling air”
22 “I am considering a syntax the color of slate”
23 “I saw stones that shone with stoniness, I saw thorns”
26 “The sublime always begins with the chord âAnd then I saw'”
28 “Awakening to gratitude in this generous Eden”
30 “The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help”
32 “She returns to her role as a seagull. The wind”
34 “At the end of this line there is an opening door”
37 “After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's amnesia”
I “They stroll on Sundays down Donningens Street”
II “What should be true of the remembered life”
III “Flattered by any masterful representation”
XX “Over the years the feast's details grew fainter”
XXI “Blessed Mary of the Derelicts. The church in Venice”
XXII “One dawn I woke up to the gradual terror”
XXIII “Teaching in St. Thomas, I had never sought it out”
1 “In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania”
2 “Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps”
3 “Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace”
4 “O Genoan, I come as the last line of where you began”
9 “I lay on the bed near the balcony in Guadalajara”
11 “The dialect of the scrub in the dry season”
12 “Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?”
18 “Grass, bleached to straw on the precipices of Les Cayes”
1 “The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard”
2 “Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such”
3 “This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels”
6 “August, the quarter-moon dangles like a bugle”
7 “It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest”
23 “What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”
24 “The sorrel rump of a mare in the bush”
30 “All day I wish I was at Case-en-Bas”
32 “Be happy now at Cap, for the simplest joysâ”
39 “For the crackle and hiss of the word âAugust'”
44 “âSo the world is waiting for Obama,' my barber said”
45 “In the leathery closeness of the car through canefields”
46 “Here's what that bastard calls âthe emptiness'â”
47 Epithalamium: The Rainy Season
54 “This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges”
Index of Titles and First Lines
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Owing to limitations of space, the epic poem
Omeros
(1990) has not been included in this collection, but it is available from FSG (ISBN: 978-0-374-52350-3).
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To Elizabeth, Anna, and Peter
FROM
25 Poems
(1949)
THE FISHERMEN ROWING HOMEWARD â¦
The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk,
Do not consider the stillness through which they move.
So I since feelings drown, should no more ask
