A CITY’S DEATH BY FIRE…. Derek Walcott
About the author:Born
on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet
and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as
a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of
14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners.
Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book
which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the
scars of colonialism and post-colonialism. Throughout a long and distinguished
career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place.
His later collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the
Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic
oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a
multicultural commitment.”
Since the 1950s Walcott divided his time between Boston, New York, and Saint
Lucia. His work resonates with Western canon and Island influences, sometimes
even shifting between Caribbean patois and English, and often addressing his
English and West Indian ancestry. According to Los
Angeles Times Book Review contributor Arthur
Vogel sang,
“These continuing polarities shoot an electricity to each other which is
questioning and beautiful and which helps form a vision altogether Caribbean
and international, personal (him to you, you to him), independent, and
essential for readers of contemporary literature on all the continents.” Known
for his technical control, erudition, and large canvases, Walcott was,
according to poet and critic Sean O’Brien, “one of the handful of poets
currently at work in English who are capable of making a convincing attempt to
write an epic … His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its
fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and
division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it.”
Note All files are in word download them one by one then convert to pdf click here to converet one by one in pdf
