It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott first published poems in the 1940s. His work seems so immortally young. I remember when I was a schoolboy reading in the magazine BIM the poems “As John to Patmos” and “A City’s Death by Fire”, written when he was still in his teens, and knew – as I knew it also when I saw Frank Worrell late cut Lance Pierre at the Queens Park Oval – that here was genius.
