Broad sun-stoned beaches.

 White heat.
 A green river.

 A bridge,
 scorched yellow palms

 from the summer-sleeping house
 drowsing through August.

 Days I have held,
 days I have lost,

 days that outgrow, like daughters,
 my harbouring arms.

This is the first Derek Walcott poem to feature on the Minstrels, a situation for which you can blame my abject lack of familiarity with post-colonial poetry in general and Walcott’s work in particular. This will not do; I really do need to read more Walcott. It’s not just that he’s an “important” poet¹, he’s also a very good one. Caught between European culture and Caribbean experience, he has spent a lifetime seeking to resolve the post-colonial paradox; in a poetic career spanning half a dozen decades, his work has been of a consistently high standard.

Walcott’s poems are about voyages. Not necessarily physical ones; he’s equally concerned with the links that connect past and present, and the journeys of the mind between them. He fills his verse with ruminations on the nature of memory and the creative imagination, the history, politics and landscape of the West Indies, his own life and loves, and his enduring awareness of time and death. These themes are explored with insight and tact; they are also, in Walcott’s hands, infused with the rarest of qualities, a sense of place.

Walcott’s poems are excellent proof of the fact that it is possible to write “poetically” using free verse. His language is elegant and evocative and never forced; his merging of various linguistic influences (the vibrant Creole of his native Caribbean, the stately Latin and Greek of the classics, the workaday English of his Boston years) gives his poetry a richness and texture lost to many more traditional poets, while the absence of formal structure gives it a suppleness equal to the demands of his themes.

Today’s poem is short, but astonishingly vivid, and deceptively subtle. Walcott uses the stillness and uniformity of summer days to highlight the inexorable passage of time; one day follows another, “drowsing through August”, until suddenly years have gone by, years which can never be reclaimed. A resolution that might easily have slipped into pathos in the hands of a lesser poet is handled here with delicacy and care, so that we are left with a sense of poignancy and loss, yes, but also of nostalgia and quietude. Notice the skill with which Walcott paints his landscape in the opening lines: he uses less than a dozen words, but they are enough. Notice, also, the sheer perfection of the analogy that concludes the poem: the phrase “like daughters” adds layers of depth and meaning and feeling to the whole. Wonderfully done.

— Thomas

[Nobel Committee announcement]

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Here is the text of the statement made by the Nobel Committee, announcing the award:

“This year the Swedish Academy has decided to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to Derek Walcott. Walcott, who is 62 was born in Saint Lucia but now lives in Trinidad. He has both African and European blood in his veins. In him West Indian culture has found its great poet. He also has a chair in English at Boston University.

Walcott showed his mettle early on. As the title of his substantial volume of “Collected Poems 1948-1984” shows, he was already writing poetry of lasting value at the end of his teens. Like Brodsky and Paz he has an intense belief in poetry and poets and he has made this one of his themes.

Otherwise it is the complexity of his own situation that has provided one of the most fruitful sources of inspiration. Three loyalties are central for him - the Caribbean where he lives, the English language, and his African origin. In the poem “A Far Cry from Africa”, he says “How choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” One of his major works, the long poem “Another Life” (1973), is devoted to his development and the course of his education in this environment.

In his collection of poems “The Arkansas Testament” (1987) he continues the broadening of perspective which is also a characteristic of his oeuvre. Among these poems can be found works dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva and W.H. Auden (“Strict as Psalm or Lesson, / I learnt your poetry”).

Walcott’s latest poetic work is “Omeros” (1990), a majestic Caribbean epos in 64 chapters - “I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea”. This is a work of incomparable ambitiousness, in which Walcott weaves his many strands into a whole. Its weft is a rich one, deriving from the poet’s wide-ranging contacts with literature, history and reality. We find Homer, Poe, Mayakovsky and Melville, allusions are made to Brodsky (“ the parentheses of palms / shielding a candle’s tongue”), and he quotes the Beatles’ “Yesterday”. Walcott’s metaphors and images are numerous, and often striking
- “And beyond them, like dominoes / with lights for holes, the black skyscrapers of Boston”. He captures white seagulls against a blue sky in the image “Gulls chalk the blue enamel”. His poetry acquires at one and the same time singular lustre and great force.

Walcott is in the first place a poet but he has also produced interesting work for the theatre. His masterstroke was “Dream on Monkey Mountain” (1970), a striking but scenographically demanding Caribbean fresco. The same dream-like atmosphere can be found in several of his plays, such as “Ti-Jean and His Brothers” (1958) and, to a certain extent, in “The Last Carnival” (in “Three Plays” (1986), which deals with two important decades in the recent history of Trinidad. A significant feature of his plays is the skill with which the author plays on his own complex range of voices. It is impossible, however, to reproduce this in the totally different language situation of Sweden.

Walcott’s style is melodious and sensitive. It seems to issue principally from a prolific inspiration. In his literary works Walcott has laid a course for his own cultural environment, but through them he speaks to each and every one of us.”

– http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1992/press.html