SOURCE: Salkey, Andrew. “Inconsolable Songs of Our America: The Poetry of Derek Walcott.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 56, no. 1 (winter 1982): 51-53.

In the following essay, Salkey discusses recurring themes of light, harmony, and completeness in Walcott's poetry.

Rather like the generalized implication that there is a whole unified scene going for all of us in the New World, in the geographical, historical and political concept of José Martí's nuestra américa, anything anyone says about the poetry of Derek Walcott can be argued as true. His is a new voice redolent with traceries of the elitist elegance of the Old World. His poetry, or at least much of it, is also a radical truth-saying in “other words,” in our time, an old report brought forward with sensitive alterations from “another country” to nuestra américa. And further, it is the Anglophone...