Derek Walcott - What the Twilight Says: Essays

Authors: Derek Walcott

Professional Reviews: Washington Post Book World: ""Walcott...writes a prose just slightly tinged with poetry, a diction that can be distinctly beautiful..."

Book Editions: Paperback245October 01, 1999Farrar Straus & Giroux8.25"(h) x 5.5"(w) x 0.75"(d), 0.65 lbs.9780374526832

Publisher's Note: When dusk heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and rusting iron which circle our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare, like the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp, is like a childhood signal to come home. Light in our cities keeps its pastoral rhythm, and the last home-going traffic seems to rush through darkness that comes from suburban swamp or forest in a noiseless rain. In true cities another life begins: neons stutter to their hysterical pitch, bars, restaurants, and cinemas blaze with artifice, and Mammon takes over the switchboard, manipulator of cities; but here the light makes our strongest buildings tremble, its colour hints of rust, more stain than air. To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the gilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or clim