This is my tribute to Derek Walcott, the ‘exuberant poet in love with the magic of words,’ who passed away almost a year ago, on March 17, 2017.
I was introduced to Derek’s poetry when my uncle, aware of my fascination with English poetry, gifted me with a copy of Derek’s ‘Selected Poems.’ I distinctly remember the book’s cover design. It was taken from Walcott’s painting of a Caribbean country scene: green flora, brown hills and a blue sky, marked by white-speckled clouds; a dynamic and accurate portrayal of a Caribbean afternoon breeze, manifested in swaying trees and rippling flags.
I got hooked on to his poems.
‘Selected Poems’ is a good starting point for anybody who wants to engage with the brilliant arc of Derek’s poetry. It contains a generous gathering of poems. Reading poems, I found that Derek wrote verse in a manner that is quite different from many of his contemporaries. For him, poetry was neither an exercise in embellishment nor a post-modernist project that reeked of twisted language or fragmented plots. Rather, his objective was made clear in the following lines in his book of poems “In a Green Night”:
…I seek,
As climate seeks its style, to write
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
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