Midsummer
Books / Paperback
Fiction › Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 0374518637 / Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, December 1984
Displaying Walcott's characteristic blend of soaring imagery and plain fact, this sequence of fifty poems explores such themes as the relationship of poetry to painting and the pull of sea, family, and friendship
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The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose cricumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures.Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-lief period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott'sThe Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."
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