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    White Egrets: Poems
    White Egrets: Poems
    White Egrets: Poems
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    White Egrets: Poems

    By Derek Walcott

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    About this ebook

    A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

    In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language.

    White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century—a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and—perhaps most surprisingly—getting older.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880511
    White Egrets: Poems
    Author

    Derek Walcott

    Derek Walcott nació en 1930 en Claistres, capital de la antigua colonia británica de Santa Lucía, una isla en las Pequeñas Antillas. Hijo de un pintor británico que murió cuando él contaba un año de edad y nieto de esclavos, a esta mezcla de culturas hay que añadir que su familia fuera protestante en una comunidad donde predominaba el catolicisimo. Estudió en el University College of the West Indies. Es fundador de Trinidad Theater Workshop, y autor de numerosas obras de teatro y libros de poesía. Entre sus obras traducidas al castellano figuran: Islas, El testamento de Arkansas, La voz del crepúsculo, La abundancia. En cuanto a Omeros, está considerada como su obra maestra y fue galardonada con el premio W. H. Smith. En 1992 le fue concedido el Premio Nobel. Foto © Lisbeth Salas

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    Reviews for White Egrets

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Simply extraordinary! Written by a poet at the height of his powers.
    • 5/5
      These poems are clearly the product of his later years (this book first came out in 2010) - the themes of aging and dying are pronounced throughout. I would love to now read some of his earlier work for comparison. I love the way Walcott uses color and images from nature in his poetry, especially the egrets that appear in many of these poems. I will just quote the closing sentences from the second verse of the poem "In the Village" about Greenwich Village in New York City:" ... It is the hellof ordinary, unrequited love. Watch those egretstrudging the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white bannerstrailing forlornly; they are the bleached regretsof an old man's memoirs, printed stanzasshowing their hinged wings like wide open secrets."
    • 5/5
      A significant departure for Walcott. This mature, reflective work examines his past and the colonial history of the Caribbean in rhymed verse. This is elegiac, thoughtful, philosophical poetry. A work for the ages.
    • 5/5
      This superb collection of poetry by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry last year. It describes a man heading toward the end of his life, filled with the life and death of others, past and relatively current events such as 9/11, the election of Barack Obama, postcolonialism and post-postcolonialism in Africa, India, and the Caribbean, and post-Franco Spain, with frequent references to nature and his travels around the world. One especially touching poem is "Sixty Years After":In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at VieuxfortI saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beautyhunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thoughtas the fire of my young life would do her dutyto be golden and beautiful and young forevereven as I aged. She was treble-chinned, old, her devastatingsmile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the feverbriefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hatingtime and the lie of general pleasantries.Small waves still break against the small stone pierwhere a boatman left me in the orange peaceof dusk, a half-century ago, maybe happierbeing erect, she like a deer in her shyness, I stalkingan impossible consummation; those who knew usknew we would never be together, at least not walking.Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us.

    Book preview

    White Egrets - Derek Walcott

    1.

    The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard

    as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vows

    to their emperor with bridle, shield and sword

    were sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice;

    no echo in that astonishing excavation.

    Each soldier gave an oath, each gave his word

    to die for his emperor, his clan, his nation,

    to become a chess piece, breathlessly erect

    in shade or crossing sunlight, without hours—

    from clay to clay and odourlessly strict.

    If vows were visible they might see ours

    as changeless chessmen in the changing light

    on the lawn outside where bannered breakers toss

    and the palms gust with music that is time’s

    above the chessmen’s silence. Motion brings loss.

    A sable blackbird twitters in the limes.

    2.

    Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such

    desert indifference, such who-the-hell-are-you? calm,

    they rise and stride away leisurely from your touch,

    waiting for you only. To be cradled in one arm,

    belly turned upward to be stroked by a brush

    tugging burrs from their fur, eyes slitted

    in ecstasy. The January sun spreads its balm

    on earth’s upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted

    their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.

    Accept it. Watch how spray will burst

    like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,

    gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,

    its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall

    to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,

    trying to fasten on everything it moved from,

    how salted things only increase its thirst.

    3.

    This was my early war, the bellowing quarrels,

    at the pitch of noon, of men moving cargoes

    while gulls screeched their monotonous vowels

    in complex curses without coming to blows;

    muscular men swirling codfish barrels

    and heaving rice bags, who had stunted nicknames,

    who could, one-handed, hoist phenomenal rolls

    of wire, hoist flapping galvanize with both arms

    to pitch it into the hold while hooks and winches

    swung nearby. At lunch they ate in the shade

    of mountainous freight bound with knots and cinches,

    ignoring the gulls with their boulders of bread.

    Then one would be terribly injured, one lose a leg

    to rum and diabetes. You would watch him shrink

    into his nickname, not too proud to beg,

    who would roar like a lorry revving in the prime of his drink.

    4.

    White Egrets

    I

    Cautious of time’s light and how often it will allow

    the morning shadows to lengthen across the lawn

    the stalking egrets to wriggle their beaks and swallow

    when you, not they, or you and they, are gone;

    for clattering parrots to launch their fleet at sunrise

    for April to ignite the African violet

    in the drumming world that dampens your tired eyes

    behind two clouding lenses, sunrise, sunset,

    the quiet ravages of diabetes.

    Accept it all with level sentences,

    with sculpted settlement that sets each stanza;

    learn how the bright lawn puts up no defences

    against the egret’s stabbing questions and the night’s answer.

    II

    The elegance of those white, orange-billed egrets,

    each like a stalking ewer, the thick olive trees,

    cedars consoling a stream that roars torrentially

    in the wet season; into that peace

    beyond desires and beyond regrets,

    at which I may arrive eventually,

    whose palms droop in the sun like palanquins

    with tigerish shadows under them. They shall

    be there after my shadow passes with all its

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