White Egrets: Poems [Hardcover]

Derek Walcott (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 16, 2010

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Nobel Prize–winner Walcott comes a 14th collection of poems, richly textured in sound and image, and spanning many countries and memories. From his native Caribbean to Italy, Spain, England, the Netherlands, and the United States, Walcott meditates on the passage of time, fallen empires, bygone love affairs, and mortality. Throughout, in metrically complex verses, he writes about the vocation of the poet with a virtuosic ear and a painterly eye (Walcott is also an accomplished watercolor and oil painter): my craft and my craft's thought make parallels/ from every object, the word and the shadow of the word/ makes a thing both itself and something else/ til we are metaphors and not ourselves/ in an empirical language that keeps growing. Walcott describes a wistful search for home in these poems—Silly to think of heritage when there isn't much, he writes—while also expressing deep joy and thanks that he finds his true and permanent home in poetry. This is poetry's weather, he says of a rainy day in Venice, a lovely moment in a beautiful book. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Long, lush, yet battering poems that surge and retract and return like the sea, like breath, are Nobel laureate Walcott’s forte. In his fourteenth collection, he curves this grand form away from the epic and toward the personal, examining the ruins of love and the puzzles of age as he enters his eightieth year. The title poem, punctuated by “stalking egrets” and “clattering parrots” and revved by a tree-tossing storm, is part elegy and part rhapsody and includes this artist’s credo: “The perpetual ideal is astonishment.” That is the state of being Walcott summons as he takes measure of yearning, regrets, and resistance to turmoil, reveling, instead, in the exaltation of earth, sky, and ocean as birds embody feelings and poetry itself. In gorgeous evocations of place––Sicily, Spain, Italy, London, New York, Amsterdam––Walcott writes of the “nausea of absence,” then rejects despair in a startling moment of connection, addressing, “You, my dearest friend, Reader.” His tropes swoop in like birds returning to roost, winged words in jazzy riffs that lift and plunge, flashing light and shadow as Walcott, a not-unscarred literary warrior reports, “I have kept the same furies.” And, looking ahead, “So much to do still, all of it praise.” --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374289298
• ISBN-13: 978-0374289294
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #549,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars egrets and regrets May 4, 2010

By Renato Baserga

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Derek Walcott is one of the finest poets of the last 50 years. His command of the English language is astonishing (hawks sitting on the wrist of a branch), his images are unforgettable (the heart that returns like the waves splashing against the rocks), his touches are heart-breaking. There are influences of a European culture that has now gone beyond the English culture so dear to Walcott. His waves' image reminds me of Rebora at his best (E giunge l'onda, ma non giunge il mare...). White Egrets is not a book you should devour. It is a book one should read slowly, one poem each night, to savour and to remuginate about. It is the book of an old poet who has made peace with his troubled soul and finally accepts his life for whatever it has been. It reminds me of what one of my teachers used to say, that God gave us memories so the we may have roses in December. Walcott has egrets, white egrets.....

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written and touching May 26, 2010

By N. Forrester

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I adore Derek Walcott. This book requires rereading to understand, and STILL is more veiled and subtle than his previous books.This is a poignant and touching goodbye to the world as he experienced it. He's old, he's ill, he's waiting for death, and he is grieving the loss of a relationship.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars More Wonderful Poetry August 28, 2010

By R. Albin TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Walcott is now 80 and while this may not be last verse we get from him, it is unlikely there will be much more to come. These short poems are uniformly excellent to outstanding and display many of Walcott's greatest qualities. The powerful imagery, his superb ability to evoke landscapes, his deep knowledge of the Western canon, and the often striking combination of nature imagery and psychological insight. Many of Walcott's favorite themes recur in these poems. His love of his native St. Lucia, the nature of colonialism, the power of the Western canon, and the glories of landscapes. Added to these themes are some strongly elegiac elements including several memorial poems for old friends and meditations on aging and approaching mortality. The image of white egrets recurs in several poems, used to denote permanent features of the natural world but also symbolic of language and art. Different readers will have different favorites. There is a particularly powerful poem dedicated to President Obama, an incredible compliment for a politician. The final poem in this book is a gentle and remarkably evocative meditation on mortality, the nature of art, and Walcott's love for St. Lucia. A just conclusion.