Derek Walcott

I am very pleased to feature Derek Walcott, Nobel laureate, as my poet of the month for December. Walcott was born on January 23, 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia. He published his first poem, The Voice of St. Lucia at 14 years old! In addition to being a gifted poet, playwright and essayist, Derek Walcott is also an accomplished artist.

For a brief but very good biography on Derek Walcott, please see Professor Edward Baugh's Introduction in Selected Poems (edited by Professor Edward Baugh). Here also are some more links to his biographical information:

http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/derek-walcott-110.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Walcott

In 1992, Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most recent (fourteenth) collection of poems is White Egrets. I just finished reading White Egrets and found the poems to be quite moving, with a few of them transporting me to places like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Capri. I particularly liked Sixty Years After, Forty Acres, which Walcott dedicated to President Obama, as well as his poem number 42, written for Lorna Goodison. For an excellent review of White Egrets, check out Jane King's Portrait of the artist as an old man on the Caribbean Review of Books website.

Listed below are some of Walcott's major works:

Plays
Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!
Remembrance and Pantomime
Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; Branch of the Blue Nile
The Odyssey
The Haitian Trilogy
Walker and The Ghost Dance

Poems
In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960
The Castaway and Other Poems
The Gulf and Other Poems
Another Life
Sea Grapes
The Star-Apple Kingdom
The Fortunate Traveller
Midsummer
Collected Poems: 1948-1984
The Arkansas Testament
Omeros
The Bounty
Tiepolo's Hound
The Prodigal
Selected Poems
White Egrets

Essays
What the Twilight Says

I hope you will find some time to enjoy the works of this celebrated son of the Caribbean.