Towards the end of The Prodigal (2004), Walcott announced that this collection was going to be his ‘last book’ (P99). We were lucky enough to have four additional ones, White Egrets (2010), Moon-Child (2012), O Starry Starry Night (2013) and Morning, Paramin (2016). All these later books display, in different ways, Walcott's concern with paintings and the visual arts in theatrical and poetic production, they contain his meditations on mortality, and they reiterate his belief in the inspirational value of the arts. In Walcott's last book, Morning, Paramin, a collection in which words and images are closely interwoven, the affirmative, hopeful vitalism of daily renewal is often intermeshed with the grief caused by the demise of friends and family members. It is difficult, in fact, not to hear the word ‘mourning’ in the titular ‘morning’: amongst the many loved ones Walcott remembers and mourns are his ex-wife Margaret, the poets Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky and Mark Strand, the playwright Arthur Miller, Robert Devaux, who devoted most of his life to study the history, culture and ecosystem of St Lucia, and the Trinidadian journalist and writer Raoul Pantin, whose name appears in the poem ‘In the Arena’, in which Walcott insists that ‘every day is like a bullfight’ which cruelly claims its victims (MP93).

‘In the Arena’ begins with the words ‘It is five’ (MP93) which resonate with the opening line of Federico García Lorca's Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías/Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935) which, written to commemorate the death and celebrate the life of Lorca's friend – a bullfighter killed in the arena or ‘plaza’ of Manzanares by the bull El Granadino – begins by establishing the exact time when life makes space for death. The pairing of Walcott's lines with Doig's painting Cyril's Bay (2009) reinforces the link between the two different places and times mentioned in ‘In the Arena’, namely, Walcott's contemporary Trinidad and Lorca's 1930s Spain. Doig's delicate rendering of Trinidad's Cyril Bay visually evokes the mist and the steep banks of the river which channels the lament of the men mourning Ignatio in the third movement of Lorca's elegy and who find their counterpart in the melancholy ‘Pagnols’ of Walcott's poem who still ‘think’ of Trinidad's ‘hills as Venezuela’ (MP93).