The Gulf

Derek Walcott · 1969 CE · Poem · Caribbean · Contemporary

A plane lifting out of Texas gives the book its governing image: a widening water between one place and another, between an America sliding toward assassination and riot and an island that no longer quite holds the man who left it. Elegies for Che, for Robert Kennedy and for a Trinidadian childhood are written from the same cold altitude. Middle-period Walcott, at his most exiled and least consoled.

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Closest analogues

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