Book description
Most of the poems in this sequence of fifty where written in close
succession during one summer in Trinidad. Their principle themes are
the relationship of poetry to painting, the stasis of midsummer in the
tropics, and the pull of the sea, family and friendship. Walcott
records the experience of middle life - in reality and in memory or
the imagination. On the publication of Derek Walcott's previous
collection, The Fortunate Traveller, Blake Morrison wrote in the
London Review of Books: 'The Forunate Traveller is an impressive
collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between
abstract notions of power and responsibility and visual notions of
landscape, cityscape and sea.' Midsummer is equally impressive.
Derek Walcott was born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930. The
author of many plays and books of poetry, most recently White Egrets
(2010), he was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988, and the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.
