Spanning more than a 30-year poetic career, Collected Poems 1948-1984 is an historic and monumental work collecting, as it does, 10 or so books by the foremost Caribbean poet writing in English, Derek Walcott. Born in 1930 in St Lucia in what was then the old British West Indies where he received a colonial education, Walcott showed an early, precocious talent for appropriating and transforming the works of the English canon to reflect his own troubled and morose diasporic experiences. From his first book, In a Green Night to the justly celebrated 1979 work, The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott's rejection of both a need for revenge and a servile posturing led him to eschew the perhaps more obvious political path of black orality for a more formal, literary diction, but one fine-tuned and honed by his own Caribbean idioms. The result, rather than mimicry, or exorcism, has been to enrich the possibilities of English language and literature. While accused of working with a conservative, Eurocentric aesthetics, the richness of Walcott's texture and his systematic refusal of stylistic boundaries has produced a complex, historically astute poetics, capable of dealing with the denials, contradictions, ideologies and blindnesses of both the Old and New Worlds. In Collected Poems 1948-1984 that vision can be seen for the first time in its full complexity. --David Marriott
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