About the Poems

Most of the poems in this sequence of fifty were written in close succession during one summer in Trinidad. Their principle themes are the relationship of poetry to painting, the stasis of midsummer in the tropics, and the pull of the sea, family and friendship.

Walcott's Perspective

Walcott records the experience of middle life - in reality and in memory or the imagination.

Critical Reception

On the publication of Derek Walcott's previous collection, The Fortunate Traveller, Blake Morrison wrote in the London Review of Books: "The Fortunate Traveller is an impressive collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between abstract notions of power and responsibility and visual notions of landscape, cityscape and sea."

Final Note

Midsummer is equally impressive.