Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCCis a Saint Lucia poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros, which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain,...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 January 1930
sugar ruins landscape
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
trying serious worthwhile
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
time memories plot
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
shadow metaphor
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
voice addresses doe
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
memories body bamboo
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
heart mirrors letters
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
white fire owl
Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna
horse stars block
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
special language english-language
The English language is nobody's special property.
enough console
The classics can console. But not enough.
sunset dark sea
I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.
wind mind damn
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
became commercial cultural human ideal port spain walker
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.