You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite poets to choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

Then, we ask them to read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Kwame Dawes, the author of

over 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His many honors include a 2019

Wyndham Campbell Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes & Noble Writers for

Writers Award and the Ford Prize for Poetry. Welcome Kwame. Thank you for joining us. It's good to be here, Kevin.

It's great to see you. So the poem you've selected from the archive is the Season of Fantasmal

Peace by Derek Walcott. Can you tell us a little bit about why you pick the poem? It's a very familiar

poem. I think it's on many Caribbean course syllabi. And it struck me that It's a very familiar poem. I think it's on many Caribbean course syllabay,

and it struck me that it's a very New York poem, or very city poem, for a Caribbean writer.

Here's Kwame Dawes reading The Season of Fantasmal Peace by Derek Walker.

The Season of Fantasmal Peace.

Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of the earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it.

They lifted up the shadows of long pines down the trackless slopes, the shadows of

glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill,

the net rising soundless as night, the birds cries soundless until there was no longer dusk or

season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light, that not the narrower shadow

dared to civil. And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery

ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight.

They could not hear battalions of Stalin's waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher,

...