Allusions in Omeros

Allusions in Omeros
Author: Maria McGarrity
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Caribbean literature (English)
ISBN: 9780813061009

Omeros is considered the masterwork of Caribbean-born poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. McGarrity, an expert on Joyce and Caribbean literature, has written a definitive and needed high-quality reading guide for this important piece of postcolonial Caribbean literature.

Sea Grapes

Sea Grapes
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880449

Derek Walcott was aptly described by Laurence Liberman in The Yale Review as "one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day." Sea Grapes deepens with this major poet's search for true images of the post-Adamic "new world"--especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott's rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets--Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda. On the publication of Selected Poems in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, "Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries." This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott's mastery. He is also the author of The Gulf, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, and Another Life.

Midsummer

Midsummer
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880430

The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose cricumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures. Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-lief period--in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Wacott's The Fortunate Traveller, "Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling--not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there?...The poet who can write like this is a master."

The System of Dante's Hell

The System of Dante's Hell
Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: Akashic Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2016-02-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1617754145

“A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno.” —Kirkus Reviews This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet’s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive. With an introduction by Woodie King Jr. “Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro.” —The New York Times Book Review “It’s a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . .” —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths

The Flight of the Vernacular

The Flight of the Vernacular
Author: Maria Cristina Fumagalli
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789042014664

In this book, Dante, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott engage in an eloquent and meaningful conversation. Dante's capacity for being faithful to the collective historical experience and true to the recognitions of the emerging self, the permanent immediacy of his poetry, the healthy state of his language, which is so close to the object that the two are identified, and his adamant refusal to get lost in the wide and open sea of abstraction - all these are shown to have affected, and to continue to affect, Heaney's and Walcott's work. The Flight of the Vernacular, however, is not only a record of what Dante means to the two contemporary poets but also a cogent study of Heaney's and Walcott's attitude towards language and of their views on the function of poetry in our time. Heaney's programmatic endeavour to be "adept at dialect" and Walcott's idiosyncratic redefinition of the vernacular in poetry as tone rather than as dialect - apart from having Dantean overtones - are presented as being associated with the belief that poetry is a social reality and that language is a living alphabet bound to the "opened ground" of the world.

Conversations with Derek Walcott

Conversations with Derek Walcott
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780878058556

When Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was cited for "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." The lively interviews in this collection reveal Walcott's generous and brilliant intelligence as well as his strong, forthright opinions. He discusses the craft of poetry, the status of contemporary poetry and drama, his founding of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and his views on a number of influential writers, including Eliot, Auden, Brodsky, Heaney, and Naipaul. Boldly speaking his mind, Walcott takes many controversial positions on a wide range of subjects, such as Caribbean and U.S. politics, literary instruction in American universities, the proper role of sound in modern poetry, and the "ego" apparent in contemporary American poetry, and problems of race. Whatever the subject, Walcott responds fully and candidly.

The Mandaean Book of John

The Mandaean Book of John
Author: Charles G. Häberl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2019-11-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110487861

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
Author: John Thieme
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1999-07-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719042065

John Thieme here provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginnings in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts--Caribbean, European and other--that have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for students and readers coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time.

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1466880333

On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer, walking from village to village, tending to the sick, waiting for a sign from God. In this dream, his one companion, Moustique, wants to exploit his power. Moustique decides to impersonate a prophet himself, ignoring a coffin-maker who warns him he will die and enraging the people of the island. Hobain, half-awake in his desolate jail cell, terrorized by the specter of his friend's corruption, clings to his visionary quest. He will try to transform himself; to heal Moustique, his jailer, and his jail-mates; and to be a leader for his people. Dream on Monkey Mountain was awarded the 1971 Obie Award for a Distinguished Foreign Play when it was first presented in New York, and Edith Oliver, writing in The New Yorker, called it "a masterpiece." Three of Derek's Walcott's most popular short plays are also included in this volume: Ti-Jean and His Brothers; Malcochon, or The Six in the Rain; and The Sea at Dauphin. In an expansive introductory essay, "What the Twilight Says," the playwright explains his founding of the seminal dramatic company where these works were first performed, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. First published in 1970, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays is an essential part of Walcott's vast and important body of work.