White Egrets »

DEREK WALCOTT was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He is the author of eight collections of plays and a book of essays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. White Egrets is his fourteenth collection of poems.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Ironically, though, death has triumphed over Walcott's work in another sense -- by moving to the center of his imagination. It could scarcely be otherwise, for a poet entering his ninth decade. The only choice facing a great writer at Walcott's stage of life is whether to approach the end philosophically, by seeking or at least pretending to seek wisdom and composure, or to rage against the dying of the light. It is hard to know which choice demands more of a writer: Apollonian calm requires the overcoming of the spirit's fear, as in the mystic assurance of Eliot's Four Quartets, while Dionysian fury requires a defiance of the body's weakness, as in the savage late poems of Yeats.