Great Regulars: These poems do achieve an extraordinary

intimacy of tone, but they also conjure, for that reader, a full spectrum of responses to mortality, from calm ("I reflect quietly on how soon I will be going") through self-mocking ("What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?") to something darker ("the pitch of para­lysed horror/that his prime is past"). And it is the calm that impresses most, after the disturbances of passion, as Walcott speaks of "that peace/beyond desires and beyond regrets/at which I may arrive eventually."

from Karl Kirchwey: The New York Times: Derek Walcott, Man of Many Voices

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