What the Twilight Says

This essay collection includes the renowned poet's Nobel lecture, literary criticism, reflections on Caribbean life, and more. Nobel laureate Derek Walcott was a leading voice in 20th century Caribbean literature. What the Twilight Says, Walcott's first collection of essays, draws together pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere. It includes his moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.