Ts Eliot Prize Winner
White Egrets
by Derek Walcott
Summary
A late masterwork from a Nobel Laureate, this collection turns on the pleasures and melancholies of ageing, using the light and landscape of St. Lucia as a ground on which to meditate on love, art, and the passing of time. Walcott's style at its finest — lush, formal, steeped in both the English lyric tradition and the Creole cultures of the Caribbean — is here compressed into some of the most beautiful poems of his late career. The collection carries the weight of a long life held up to the light.
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Historical Context & Significance
The Nobel Laureate Walcott was praised for a work that balanced the local beauty of St. Lucia with a global and historical sense of loss.