The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013

Walcott is a generous writer in every sense. The expansive, celebratory texture of his verse is instantly recognisable. It moves with ease between city and country, between "the snow still falling in white words on Eighth Street" and the way "Sunshine [. . .] stirs the splayed shadows of the hills like moths" . . . an astonishing poet.

The opening pages testify to [Walcott's] precociously stylish fluency and his early discovery of a subject he has yet to exhaust, the situation of a poet who writes from the margins of literary tradition . . . The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 ends with a bang: Walcott’s last collection, White Egrets (2010), shows the 80-year-old poet still ranging insistently across the Caribbean world he has delivered to his readers for six decades and finding within it the resources to address, with wit and colour, the historically determined landscapes he has lived in.

Walcott is a poet we are lucky to have writing . . . Taken as a whole, this collection gives us a kind of narrative – the story of a poet who is developing even in his eighties, sustained by faith in what poetic forms can do, and the many ways in which those forms can do it.

Few poets can sustain a collection spanning more than 600 pages . . . Derek Walcott is one of the rare exceptions, and this is his most comprehensive anthology so far. Covering nearly seven decades, it is testament to an extraordinary talent . . . and a reminder of a great poet, whose life has been as vast as his work.