Collected Poems, 1948-1984

Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 533
Release: 1986
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374520259

Includes most of the poems in each of Walcott's collections as selected by the poet, and the complete text of Another Life.

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
Author: Edward Baugh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2006-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139449176

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott is one of the Caribbean's most famous writers. His unique voice in poetry, drama and criticism is shaped by his position at the crossroads between Caribbean, British and American culture and by his interest in hybrid identities and diaspora. Edward Baugh's Derek Walcott analyses and evaluates Walcott's entire career over the last fifty years. Baugh guides the reader through the continuities and differences of theme and style in Walcott's poems and plays. Walcott is an avowedly Caribbean writer, acutely conscious of his culture and colonial heritage, but he has also made a lasting contribution to the way we read and value the western literary tradition. This comprehensive survey considers each of Walcott's published books, offering a guide for students, scholars and readers of Walcott. Students of Caribbean and postcolonial studies will find this a perfect introduction to this important writer.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374125619

A collection spanning the range of the writer's career includes his first published poem, his celebrated verses on violence in Africa, his mature work from "The Star-Apple Kingdom, " and his late masterpieces from "White Egrets."

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.

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.

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
Author: Paula Burnett
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813063256

?An important contribution to the study of Walcott?s poetry and plays.??Modernism/modernity ?Walcott, [Burnett] says, has assimilated western tradition to his own project, using it to create a new plural world of open-ended possibilities. . . . A book that should be of interest to any student of Walcott?s literature.??Times Higher Education Supplement ?This ambitious book takes in the full corpus of Walcott?plays, essays, interviews, etc., as well as the poetry?and argues the essential unity of his (humanistic) vision.??Wasafiri ?Burnett is very good on Walcott?s aesthetic and technical strategies, particularly the mythopoeic framework of his thought, and the epic form which he frequently employs.??New West Indian Guide ?Convincingly suggests that Walcott?s art radiates outward from St. Lucia to the West Indies, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Americas, becoming an art that honors and enlarges the English language and its multiple histories and usages.??World Literature Today

White Egrets

White Egrets
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880511

A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century—a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and—perhaps most surprisingly—getting older.

The Bounty

The Bounty
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880325

The Bounty was the first book of poems Derek Walcott published after winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the poet's mother, the book features a haunting series of poems that evoke Walcott's native ground, the island of St. Lucia. "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves," Walcott's great contemporary Joseph Brodsky once observed. "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Another Life

Another Life
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880309

In his longest and most ambitious poem, Derek Walcott reaches beyond an evocative portrayl of his native West Indies to create a moving elegy on himself and on man. The fascinating and complex matrix of the author's life is illuminated with our candor, verve, and strength. Over four thousand lines of verse are grouped into four parts. He evokes scenes of his divided childhood, in which children live in shacks while fine khaki-clothed Englishmen drink tea. He depicts the influence of three intimate friends, including his first love, Anna, on his emergence as a man and artist. He chronicles the mixed remorse and resolution of maturity. He recalls of his youth: "We were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names..." Yet in retrospect he acknowledges the irony of his artistic reliance on metaphor to transform reality--his search for "another life" When the author's most recent collection of poetry, The Gulf, was published, Selden Rodman wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Now, with the publication of his fourth book of verse, Walcott's stature in the front rank of all contemporary poets using English should be apparent." Chad Walsh in Book World said: "I am convinced one of the half-dozen most imporant poets now writing in English. He may prove to be the best." Another Life helps to fulfill this prophecy.

The Prodigal

The Prodigal
Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466880414

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In this book of poems, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.