What the Twilight Says

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, drawn from pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

This collection forms a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's 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.

I

What the Twilight Says
The Muse of History
The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory

II

On Robert Lowell
On Hemingway
C. L. R. James
The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul
Magic Industry: Joseph Brodsky
The Master of the Ordinary: Philip Larkin
Ted Hughes
Crocodile Dandy: Les Murray
The Road Taken: Robert Frost
A Letter to Chamoiseau

III

Café Martinique: A Story