Derek Walcott

He has won almost every other poetry award he’s eligible for, and this evening in London it was announced that Derek Walcott has won the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for his latest book, White Egrets.

From the UK Guardian’s report:

The winning collection . . . was described by the chair of judges, poet Anne Stevenson, as “moving and technically flawless”.

“It took us not very long to decide that this collection was the yardstick by which all the others were to be measured. These are beautiful lines; beautiful poetry,” she said . . .

She praised Walcott’s technical mastery, saying: “It is a complete book from first to last; each poem belongs completely.” She added: “He is a very great poet — one of the finest poets writing in English.” . . . According to Stevenson, the collection “sees a return to his Caribbean setting after sojourns in England and America and he is, as it were, blessing the world instead of complaining about it”.

A nice birthday present for a poet who just turned eighty-one.

Jane King reviewed White Egrets in the November 2010 CRB; you can find more of our coverage plus links to other useful resources at the CRB’s special Walcott page.

View of St Lucia from the sea. Photograph by Mike Werner, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

While the CRB publishes new reviews and other material (almost) every week, we’re also slowly transferring the contents of all our back issues to our new online archive. (It’s going to take us a few months longer — we’re talking about several hundred reviews, essays, poems, stories, interviews, etc.) This is a rich resource for anyone interested in recent Caribbean literature and culture, and we’re quite proud of it. Starting today, Antilles will feature a regular Sunday series looking back at some of our favourite pieces from the CRB archive.

In our May 2005 issue we published two poems — “St Joseph at the Music School” and “A Turtle Like Zeus” — by the St Lucian poet Jane King. Both are meditations on mortality (human and reptile), delicately playing the whimsical against the wistful:

The wind sussurating the shak-shak trees
almost drowning the sounds of the sea
and the children performing for teachers
in the building behind me.
My small son suffers his lesson
silently . . .

You can read both poems here, and find more poems from the CRB archive via our subject index.