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    Gulf and Other Poems
    Gulf and Other Poems
    Gulf and Other Poems
    Ebook119 pages44 minutes

    Gulf and Other Poems

    By Derek Walcott

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    About this ebook

    As his title suggests, Derek Walcott's new poems--while making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery--are concerned with themes of isolation and the achievement of identity through loneliness. When it was published in England in 1969, The Gulf was awarded the Cholmondeley prize for poetry. As the London Times wrote, "His new collection is as noble and stern and grand as Milton...Walcott writes with a tropical glory of images; handles his huge pyrotechnic vocabulary with iron-discipline , verve and nerve...His glittering intelligence and luxurious command of sensation fuse in a mastery of images which burst in the brain like balls of phosphorescent fire."

    The subject of the title poem is the alienation and isolation of an America

    where filling-station signs
    proclaim the Gulf, an air, heavy
    with gas
    sickens the state, from Newark
    to New Orleans.

    The central figure in the Caribbean poems is a Robinson Crusoe-like castaway, who "learns again the self-creating peace of islands."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880351
    Gulf and Other 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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      Book preview

      Gulf and Other Poems - Derek Walcott

      from The Castaway

      TO JOHN HEARNE

      The Flock

      The grip of winter tightening, its thinned

      volleys of blue-wing teal and mallard fly

      from the longbows of reeds bent by the wind,

      arrows of yearning for our different sky.

      A season’s revolution hones their sense,

      whose target is our tropic light, while I

      awoke this sunrise to a violence

      of images migrating from the mind.

      Skeletal forest, a sepulchral knight

      riding in silence at a black tarn’s edge

      hooves cannonading snow

      in the white funeral of the year,

      ant-like across the forehead of an alp

      in iron contradiction crouched

      against those gusts that urge the mallards south.

      Vizor’d with blind defiance of his quest,

      its yearly divination of the spring.

      I travel through such silence, making dark

      symbols with this pen’s print across snow,

      measuring winter’s augury by words

      settling the branched mind like migrating birds,

      and never question when they come or go.

      The style, tension of motion and the dark,

      inflexible direction of the world

      as it revolves upon its centuries

      with change of language, climate, customs, light,

      with our own prepossession day by day

      year after year with images of flight,

      survive our condemnation and the sun’s

      exultant larks.

                               The dark impartial Arctic

      whose glaciers encased the mastodon,

      froze giant minds in marble attitudes,

      revolves with tireless, determined grace

      upon an iron axle, though the seals

      howl with inhuman cries across its ice

      and pages of torn birds are blown across

      whitening tundras like engulfing snow.

      Till its annihilation may the mind

      reflect his fixity through winter, tropic,

      until that equinox when the clear eye

      clouds, like a mirror, without contradiction,

      greet the black wings that cross it as a blessing

      like the high, whirring flock that flew across

      the cold sky of this page when I

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