(12/24/2008) Selected Poems by Derek Walcott. New York. 1964. Farrar Straus & Company. keywords: Poetry Caribbean Black St. Lucia. 85 pages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Two years ago, with the publication in England of his first book, IN A GREEN NIGHT, Derek Walcott was recognized at once as a new poet of imaginative energy and power. As Robert Graves wrote, 'Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most of his English-born contemporaries. ' A critic in The Listener described the poems as 'full of summery melancholy, fresh and, stinging colors, luscious melody, and intense awareness of place'--the place being the West Indian world in which Derek Walcott was brought up. SELECTED POEMS brings together the best poems from the earlier volume, and new poems written since 1960. This rich collection introduces an important new poetic talent to American readers. 'He writes extraordinarily good poetry,' wrote The Sphere, 'balanced and compassionate in spite of angry tension of race, stringing his words together in a rich but measured pattern with the wry sadness of a Caribbean Eliot.'

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