Derek Walcott's first poetry collection in three years has won him his first award in nineteen; unless of course you count that honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 2008.
The 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry went to Walcott on January 25th because of his collection, "White Egrets," which was published by Faber and Faber last year. The prize is awarded by the Poetry Book Society and is open to any new poetry collection published in English in the U.K. and Ireland. It seems to have been a close run affair with Seamus Heaney's "Human Chain" also a strong contender for the prize.
The Prize was begun in 1993 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Poetry Book Club's foundation. The prize was named after the club's founding poet, T.S. Eliot. His widow, Valerie Eliot, who was 38 years his junior when they wed, donates £15,000 ($20,000) to the winner each year. Regardless of the money, the prize has been described as "the prize most poets want to win" by former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott was born in Castries, St. Lucia in 1930, the son of a bohemian watercolourist and the local Methodist Church leader. His father, the painter, and his twin brother Roderick died when Derek was young and it was down to his mother raise him.
Walcott's aptitude for poetry showed itself early on. At the age of 14 he got a poem entitled "1944" published in a collection called "The Voice of St. Lucia." By the time he was 19 he'd published two collections of his own; 1948's "25 Poems" and 1949's "Epitaph For The Young: XI Cantos."
His early poems were characterised by his taking on of St. Lucia's colonial past. Like all former colonies from Africa to the Philippines via the Caribbean, colonial rule had often been bitter and divisive. He approached his themes with formal rules; taking pleasure in the rhyme and formalized structures rather than free verse. Walcott's works have been seen by generations as accessible.
After graduating from university in Jamaica he moved to Trinidad and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He later took up lecturing at the University of Boston until his retirement in 2007. In 1991 he founded the Boston Playwright's Theatre.
In 1992, Derek Walcott's work was recognised by the Nobel Foundation when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since then there has been a national holiday known as Nobel Day. Yet, Walcott is not the first Nobel Prize winner from the small island nation. In 1979 economist Sir Arthur Lewis.
Walcott's life has not been without controversy. In 1991 he was accused of sexually harassing a freshman at Harvard University. The dispute was eventually settled in 1996. A whispering campaign about this accusation led to him withdrawing from the race to become the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2009.
White Egrets
Chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize judging committee, Anne Stevenson described this year's winning collection, "White Egrets" as "a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet."
The book is filled with seductive rhymes and personal poems deeply inspired by Walcott's native Caribbean; especially his home country, St. Lucia. The Telegraph of London's Tom Payne describes the collection as being a mixture of that rich Caribbean/St. Lucian history and a love for English poetic tradition.
"White Egrets" takes Walcott from St. Lucia to London via the canals of Amsterdam and barber shop talk of Obama in America before taking him to his own regrets. Walcott is a worthy winner of the T.S. Eliot prize and the world will be happy to hear the poetic legend has an inkling in the back of his mind for another dose of Caribbean soul poetry.
Walcott finishes this award winning book with the poem entitled "Untitled." It is a poem reproduced in its entirety in the Observer. The last two lines being:
"as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes
white again and the book comes to a close."
Mark Wollacott - Mark Wollacott is a thirty year old Brit from the Cotswolds. He began writing in 2000 when press-ganged into writing a play for the ...
