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my highest recommendation
if you ask me to name my favorite poet, without hestitation i would answer derek walcott.any collection of poems by walcott is reason for a personal celebration, White Egrets no less, and in my enthusiasm i would hope that you find in the poems in this book by mr walcott at least some of the pleasure that i do.

when speaking of poetry, there's always talk of the line.one from White Egrets chosen at random:

`hide her face in mist and the barred sun shrivel'

i remove my finger from the page and look up and see the line is from the poem, Epithalamium: The Rainy Season.an epithalamium is a wedding song, and the poem was written `For Stephanos and Heather', a couple who means nothing to me, but who must be very special to mr walcott for him to dedicate a poem to them.their wedding in a rainy season is captured in the one line i selected at random; the mist become veil and the sun shrivel the appearance as the folds created by the drape of the veil, as well as being an allusion to a shakespearean sonnet.any line by walcott would reveal as many gifts.as a reader i am honored to be recipient of his poems, several of them, like White Egrets, for and in memory of his friends, like the joseph of white egrets, his good friend and fellow nobel laureate holder, joseph brodsky.

there's a poem here to president barack obama, Forty Acres, of an engraving:

`Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving -
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy:a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president; a field of snow-flecked cotton
forty acres wide,of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors,... `

not the american ancestors of mr obama, but the ancestors of a more extended culture, and the direct ancestors of his wife and his daughters who are part of a race who claim him, and he has accepted and claimed as his own through the mingled blood of family.

and there are other poems of travel, reminiscences, old lovers,aging and the feel of the loss of poetic powers, a trope of old men, real and fictional as prospero, a character from one of walcott's favorite shakespearean plays.his poetry remains grounded in the west indian island of his birth and the british island that gave birth to many of the poets of a tradition, problematic to him, which he's honored as one of the tradition's noblest and most distinguished poets.

the couplet he inserts in A London Afternoon:

`but though from court to cottage he depart,
his saint is sure of his unspotted heart'

by the 16th century british poet, george peele, entitled A Farewell to Arms,concludes with the couplet:

`Goddess, allow this aged man his right
To be your beadsman now that was your knight.'

no poet serves, or has served, poetry better, than derek walcott.

More Wonderful Poetry
Walcott is now 80 and while this may not be last verse we get from him, it is unlikely there will be much more to come.These short poems are uniformly excellent to outstanding and display many of Walcott's greatest qualities.The powerful imagery, his superb ability to evoke landscapes, his deep knowledge of the Western canon, and the often striking combination of nature imagery and psychological insight.Many of Walcott's favorite themes recur in these poems.His love of his native St. Lucia, the nature of colonialism, the power of the Western canon, and the glories of landscapes.Added to these themes are some strongly elegiac elements including several memorial poems for old friends and meditations on aging and approaching mortality.The image of white egrets recurs in several poems, used to denote permanent features of the natural world but also symbolic of language and art.Different readers will have different favorites.There is a particularly powerful poem dedicated to President Obama, an incredible compliment for a politician.The final poem in this book is a gentle and remarkably evocative meditation on mortality, the nature of art, and Walcott's love for St. Lucia. A just conclusion.

Driving Vessel
Perhaps, because I looked so hard through the slapping growth
(for like and kind). Maybe it's caused by any growth made while
the slaps were sent, received, that a sense of the sort
beyond greatness in the work of this very fallible is met.
Mind these not. From your sitting stand, read and decide.
But for me, reading Mr. Walcott here in his humble (however got)
honest, has set revelation lengths ahead of ego its foe,
and caused what is post below.


DRIVING VESSEL

Be a man of projects. - Scribe Ani

In double harness, wonder a plague,
he crossed the threshold of eighty and asked,
three years back in his Sea-Change,
whether he (and at himself he laughed)
would become Superman at seventy-seven.
Body, ship of state to rend and break;
closed for repair, rest, nutrition,
and the ancient's second medicine, exercise
award greatness the wreath and dodge of attack.
Each hand captains their driving vessel,
Nestor in the cart with Diomedes at a hundred.
All who on this eye, mouth planet, walked, stooped,
hewed, and drove from before Abram through
to a fighter in New York or a diver in Japan.
`must do more than when they were young,'

I think of those two Athenians, in (their) Politeias
who quote another:
"When a man no longer has to work for a living,
he should practice excellence."
"Eat less and leap more," Rabelais has
the peasant ass say to the dandy, court horse.
And my own tall sire only gave in when stranded,
garage-less in his Purgatory at eighty,
final sleep coming six to seven years on,
and still more man than many.
A superman at eighty? Life puts legs to it!

© Copyright 2010 (17 April-03 June) Joseph Duvernay

Beautifully written and touching
I adore Derek Walcott. This book requires rereading to understand, and STILL is more veiled and subtle than his previous books.This is a poignant and touching goodbye to the world as he experienced it. He's old, he's ill, he's waiting for death, and he is grieving the loss of a relationship.

A Compelling Read!
In White Egrets his expressions drip with candor. It is clear that he represents the pulse of Caribbean poetry. He speaks so eloquently about his West Indian existence. "There never really was a `we' or `ours' whatever each enjoyed was separate."


In White Egrets he has allowed the reader to travel around the world with him and you move to the rhythm, rhyme of his poetry. White Egrets is soaked in imagery, including the paintings of "Frans, Hals,and Rembrandt." One can metaphorically hear the sounds of this book as his depth details is compelling, original and his observations are sparkling. This book is a composition of varying lengths. He puts his feelings into words as he expresses himself with his own inner voice which for him is a natural beat, as he is unconcerned about the prospect of human opinion or annihilation.


He is an honest poet as he questions his permanent value, he wonders if he has lost his gift of poetry he wonders if his "gift has withered" but one thing he clearly states and concedes in White Egrets is that if he has truly lost his gift he should grateful. He says "be grateful that you wrote well in this place." I hope this is not his last. White Egrets is a must have for any library and great gift. White Egrets for me is perfection in its raw form, time indeed as inflicted him with wisdom.

Brenda McCartney
[...] ... Read more

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This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."
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Customer Reviews (7)

Collected Poems 1848-1984
I read a poem in O'magazine a few years ago and was in the process of throwing out some magazines for recycling and thought I'd better look through them and see if I should re-read any of the articles.When I got to the poem, titled Love After Love I just stopped. I couldn't believe that I had only breezed through it and put it aside. I tore the page out of the magazine and also made copies. I LOVED THIS POEM!! It did something to me when I read it,.. and I can read it over and over again and get the same feeling.I finally decided to google the author and locate the poem.Amazon.com had tons of info and the book, so I bought it and I never buy anything online.This book has been worth it.Every poem is simply incredible, but my favorite will always be 'Love After Love'.

Sand and the sound of the waves.
When you read Derek Walcott you cannot help but be dragged into his world. It is not a world where you sit on the beach, drink a beer and listen to Jimmy Buffett all day.

Instead, it is a world where life is hard. You live in a place where nature is indeed beautiful but at times unforgiving. The sun cooks you, the sand chafes you and the water drains you.

In this book of collected poems, Walcott has some of his more famous poems along with relatively unknown ones. Some are like the Iliad, some are strange and need deep introspection. Either way, they all touch some part of your psyche. It is obvious that he has won so many prizes for his work, least of all the Nobel Prize. It is accessible and deep all at the same time.

Good poets guide us in the story, we take what we can and allow ourselves to open up and understand the beauty of the work. Walcott is a master of the tour.
-----------------------------------
Excerpt from "Egypt, Tobago"

There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.

Numb Antony, in the torpor
stretching her inert
sex near him like a sleeping cat,
knows his heart is the real desert.

Over the dunes
of her heaving,
to his heart's drumming
fades the mirage of the legions,

across love-tousled sheets,
the triremes fading.
Ar the carved door of her temple
a fly wrings its message.

He brushes a damp hair
away from an ear
as perfect as a sleeping child's.
He stares, inert, the fallen column.

He lies like a copper palm
tree at three in the afternoon
by a hot sea
and a river, in Egypt, Tobago

Her salt marsh dries in the heat
where he foundered
without armor.
He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,

the uproar of arenas,
the changing surf
of senators, for
this silent ceiling over silent sand -

this grizzled bear, whose fur,
moulting, is silvered -
for this quick fox with her
sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,

his head
is in Egypt, his feet
in Rome, his groin a desert
trench with its dead soldier.

-----------------------------------

Highly recommended.

Thank you for reading my review.

A true Caribbean Genius
...i firmly believe he has reperesented the caribbean in a way no- one has ever done before. Derek Walcott's diction and his superb metaphors are yet to be seen in any other caribbean poet. Yet, like the jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley, Walcott has used his art in such a way that the whole world can identify with his work. His development of major themes such as alienation and cultural identity, Caribbean history , society and development and the pOst colonial era truly represents the region in a realistic way. His poems are truly inspirational and representative of the Caribbean.Walcott's poems are a reseviour for any historian who wishes to know about the history of the Caribbean. One shoud note that Walcott has not only used the english language in his poems but he has created the rhyme and rhythm in such a way to achieve a Caribbean creole(See "Parades Parades"), thus firmly establishing his identity as a caribbean poet and writer.IN CONCLUSION, Walcott is a true genius and we in the caribbean are proud of him.

He didn't win a Nobel Prize for nothing
This cool dude uses language in a way no one else does. He redefines syntax, conventions, the way words are placed together, and forms a new interpretation of phrase-synthesis I can't even begin to describe.Actually, I will. There's lots of surrealism here, but not just for its ownsake. There's deep philosophy here too. The sombering tones give theincredulous imagery and abstractionistic logic (this guy's a hard read, asit says in the preface) and language that makes him something like a SylviaPlath in tuxedo, but with a much wider-spanning genius that gives hispoetry a greater variety of elements and vocabulary, and with better breaksand sense of poetic rhythm.

Walcott's Incomparable Command of the English Language
One cannot recommend this book too highly.It is a certain classic for scores of generations to come.Derek Walcott IS the Carribean.His poems enrich the reader's sense of the Carribean without everover-sentimentalizing.Walcott's keen observations heighten the familiar,while at times domesticating the exotic.His poem "The Spoiler'sReturn" is equally humorous and disturbing, as it adresses the socialproblems of the Carribean, and is best appreciated when read with aCarribean accent.His lines ebb and flow like a tide, but always draw youin and never disappoint.Must read poems of his: "Codicil","The Spoiler's Return", "LI" (from the Midsummercollection), "The Schooner Flight", "The FortunateTraveller".If you buy one collection of English poetry publishedafter WWII, this should be the book you purchase.No one alive can makethe English language work as powerfully and brilliantly for him/her asDerek Walcott can. ... Read more

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Superb
This really is a wonderful anthology.Baugh is to be congratulated for his selection of Walcott poems.What is most impressive about this book is the remarkable consistency of superb and characteristic poetry from the beginnings of Walcott's career to more recent work.The themes of exile, Walcott's ambivalent relationship with the European canon, and the nature of colonialism run throughout the work.Much of this work is autobiographical, presenting Walcott's remarkable ability to translate personal experience into beautiful language and universal themes.

GREAT!
I love Derek Walcott, and this is the best collection of his poetry I've ever seen. Amazing editing. ... Read more

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From the Nobel laureate, a "resplently luminous" (Paul Gray, Time) book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart.Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,paused on a step of this couplet, I have never foundits image again, a hound in astounding light.Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris. The poet himself hunts for a detail -- "a slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" -- of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-six of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.
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The Painting
For reference, the white hound may be the one found in "Finding the Moses" by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. See also youtube's "Tiepolo's Hound: A Reading by Derek Walcott".

Tiepolo's Hound
With so many wondrous works, it is tempting to take Walcott's poetic virtuosity for granted. Of them all, this is my favorite, and this one features his virtuosity at its most shining. His effortlessly rhyming couplets sing themes of painting and poetry, biography and myth, existential pain and release,geography and spirit. And Pissarro the painter is duly celebrated.

"Coffee-table poetry and art"
Derek Walcott has always confessed his ambitions to be a painter of note.While poetry became his favourite wife, his love for painting never disappeared. Over the years he has continued to paint, and his art nowdecorates the covers of his poetry collections. "Tiepolo's Hound"seems one of the least personal of Walcott's books. While we get glimpsesof the poet's life, he is more concerned to explore the life of CamillePisarro to understand the heart of the individual bound to the calling ofartist. It seems a tentative, searching exploration.Obviously identifyingwith their common Caribbean childhood and the influences of landscape andhistory they share, Walcott tries to see into the complex struggles of thisartist who left the Caribbean for Paris, to become one of the fathers ofimpressionism.Seeking his epiphanic hound,he shares with us the painterswho excited his artistic inspiration. Alongside his rhyming couplets he hasplaced twenty six of his own paintings-some very good, others less so.It israre to find a book like this, coffetable poetry and art together by thesame artist. Now seventy, this Nobel Laureate is not afraid to share hismeditations on art and poetry-through art and poetry-warts and all.Acollector's item.Walcott's readers must be patient with him, and try to gowith him as he charts, quite bravely,his questionings of the artist'scommitment and the cost."Whatever the age is, it lies in the smallspring of poetry everywhere"(p66).A defining comment.Read"poetry" as the very heart of all art. ... Read more

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A flock of commas
In the "Prodigal", the noble poet luareate, Walcott proves again
he is a man of humble proportion with grand perspective. This landscape of memory lives in poignant hues. His flock of commas soar across stanzas of history. In the color nuiance, he bares his painted soul, so we may grow. ... Read more

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Help from Hamner
Although Derek Walcott's Caribbean meditation on Homer's Odyssey stands byitself as an eloquent and thrilling work of epic poetry, to read it withouta helping hand--or book--is to miss many of its riches. In accessiblelanguage (no unintelligible academic posturing here), Hamner reveals theallusions and untangles the threads: Homer, history of St. Lucia, Walcott'sautobiographical allusions, etc. It can be used while one is reading thepoem, or skimmed afterward. (It took me a day.) Either way, it's excellentand readable support. ... Read more

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A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.
Amazon.com Review
Creating an epic poem based on Homer and Odysseus seems a riskyproposition for a modern poet, but Derek Walcott accomplishes the feat withstunning results in Omeros. The title, which is Homer's name in Greek,nods to the wandering and exile of the great poet himself, who learned andsuffered while traveling. From there, Walcott takes off to "see thecities of many men and to know their minds." After an exhilaratingexploration of tremendous proportions, we learn of the past and the presentand ride along the rhythm of the words of Walcott in this amazing text. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

classical poetry in our contemporary world
It is an all too uncommon delight to read a contemporary work that contains all the greatness of classical literature, that deserves to be shelved beside Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante. This is such a work. An epic poem that lavishes in the power and stunning beauty of words and images, utterly striking poetry as a mix of classical and modernist literature, reflecting the process of the mind and the process of the literary history. This wonderful poetry, some of the best I've ever read, is used to capture the land and peoples of St. Lucia. The action concerns two men, Achille and Hector, that fight an epic war for the affection of Helen. Woven into the tale, besides the stunning poetry, is the clashing of the races, the condition of the native peoples of the Americas, the nature of war, no longer for women, but for land and national pride. Fascinating epic poetry with stunning imagery of a classical world mixed with our own. The American epic poem. Grade: A

Wonderful
This richly allusive poem is an exploration of the colonial experience, primarily from the viewpoint of the dispossessed.While based in Walcott's native St. Lucia, the poem ranges across North America and Europe, and draws on a rich literary heritage.While not strictly speaking an epic by traditional standards, Omeros is epic in scope and ambition.Most of Walcott's characters, including an autobiographical narrator, are individuals in search of a home.The poem itself is an effort to reconcile both the European tradition with the experience of dispossession and enslavement. Walcott calls on Homer, Milton, Joyce, the history of St. Lucia, and many other resources to produce this impressive poem.Walcott's ability to vary his poetry and language across the whole length of the poem is impressive.Parts are intensely lyrical, others witty. The descriptive writing is often superb.A number of sequences, for example, the opening section and the dream voyage of one character to his ancestral Africa are stunning.

Epic
Exploring the relationships between natives, tourists, and nature, Walcott moves beyond just our relationships with one another to create this modern epic. Evocative of the Iliad with its battles between Hector and Achille over the yellow-dressed Helen, Omeros moves beyond just the interactions of the natives to greater themes.

There are many exciting parts to the poem: the beauty of the language, the themes, that it was only on the second time reading Omeros that I realized it rhymed, such is the seeming effortlessness with which Walcott writes. It is a modern epic for the way it is able to really explore human relationships with one another, with the trees, with people invading our indigenous societies.

Walcott manages to focus on a few people in spite of the seemingly huge scope of Omeros, and this makes the book much more deeply enjoyable. I recommend it heartily.

Postcolonial Homer
Walcott confidently feels his way into epic form, borrowing the blind eyes of Homer and tropes from Homer's tales.Jam-packed with craft, OMEROS' Dantesque tercets make hairpin turns on the pinpoints of vowels and consonants.Walcott is nothing if not evocative, calling forth the spirits of breadfruit, waves, Plains Indians, sunken treasure, sea creatures and all his other muses with a music that is beyond sounds.

For all the great poetry, what fans of the modern epic will miss in OMEROS is a narrative through-line.Structurally, it is more like William Carlos Williams' PATERSON or especially Hart Crane's THE BRIDGE, than like THE ILLIAD or THE ODYSSEY.The stories in the poem are given secondary importance to the ideas.While I will not disagree with other reviewers' characterizations of the characters as 'well-developed,' I will say that Walcott gives his characters very little to do.The greatest journey is the one taken by the un-named narrator (who seems to be prowling the University Poet circuit from the Carribean to the U.S. to England).Those who want a story with their modern epic are directed to THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER by James Merrill.

What Walcott offers in place of narrative is recollections, meditations and essays on a post-colonial world.Certain human motifs are bound to repeat, he says, and demonstrates with the story of fishermen Hector and Achille fighting for the island girl in the yellow dress, Helen.To me, Omeros is really a collection of poems in a similar form spiralling around similar themes, taking up each others' melodies in different keys.Like any symphony, it sometimes gets lost.But its individual passages are, more often than not, magnificent -- and beautiful to hear.

The worst poem it has ever been my fire's misfortune to burn
Why is it not possible to bestow 0 stars upon an item? I cannot express deeply enough how horrible this 320-some-odd-page poem is. It is the longest complaint I have ever had to trudge through. That is all it is. One long list of complaints. All the narrator does throughout the piece is whine about the same things. A repetative compliation of meaningless and monotonous rants about where he belongs in life, and what makes them so tedious is the fact that you can never relate to the man, so there is no way to feel remorse. I will admit that there are some eloquent descriptions and very mild humour, but it is not enough to save this tragically wordy, muddled, vague, boring, unoriginal, god-please-take-me-now tribute to an overrated classics writer. Save yourself the long nights and headaches....Stay far, far away! ... Read more

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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.
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Customer Reviews (5)

nice surprise
I had to order this book for a class and was not really looking forward to reading it, however, I must say the plays are EXCELLENT. There is a reason Walcott has been so well received among the literary world. These plays are interesting and very imaginative, plus Walcott always gives your vocabulary a good work out!

Walcott is an interesting writer
This was required for a theatre class.To get the full gist of this play you need to research African roots, myths, and superstitions.I Enjoyed it.

Nice play
I had to read it a few times to understand what was really going on. Because it is written in a Creole dialect it was some what hard to understand, but if you re-read where you are confused you can easily figure it out. It's a very nice story about a poor, old, sad black man, and his yearning for home.

Genius!
Walcott is a genius. These early works are among the first indications that he was to be a the literary master.

Very interesting
I did this book for my literature class and I thought it was vey interesting. It reminded me somewhat of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man". This book is vey interesting and is written by a man who is basically a minority where he is from due to his religion and up bringing. The book's main character is Makak who is ashamed of his identity as a black man and idealizes the moon because it is white. Eventually he learns to accept himself as he is. ... Read more

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With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott's new play, commissioned by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros.

Episodes of the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, The Odyssey confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.
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The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate.

Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.
Amazon.com Review
Derek Walcott's identity as a poet is evident even in his literarycriticism. Who else would produce a sentence such as "Let the shaggy, longhorde of spiky letters and the dark rumbling of hexametrical phalanxes riseover the outback towards the capital of the English language" to describethe work of a fellow poet--in this case, Australian Les Murray? Indeed,each of the essays in What the Twilight Says is at least as rich inlanguage as it is in ideas; so much so, in fact, that at times the view isobscured by the verbiage. Nevertheless, beneath the loco rococo turns ofphrase Walcott has some serious points to make. In his discussion of V.S.Naipaul, for example, he offers some telling insights into the effects ofcolonialism on his subject's psyche: "What is the cost to his Indianness ofloving England?" Walcott asks; "To whom does he owe any fealty? Ancestors?The surroundings that history placed them in, the cane fields of Trinidad,were contemptible, as they themselves would have to be, having lost bothshame and pride. Therefore, the only dignity is to be neither master norservant, to choose a nobler servitude: writing. The punishment for thechoice is the astonishment of gratitude; to be grateful to the vegetationof an English shire. Not to India or the West Indies, but to the sweet itchof an old wound." Walcott praises Naipaul's genius while calling him on hisracism, selfishness, and disdain for his roots--in effect loving thesinner while hating the sin. His essay on Joseph Brodsky is an intelligentmeditation on the art of translation while "The Muse of History" looks atthe influence of history in New World literature. From a discussion of thepoetry of Ted Hughes to an open love letter to Martiniquan writer PatrickChamoiseau, Derek Walcott provides plenty of provocative food for thoughtwrapped in poetical prose. --Alix Wilber ... Read more

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This is the first authorized literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St. Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-Creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate of England. The author had had access to letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Walcott is seen as someone driven by the need to justify his life and fulfill his talents before an unknowable God, but who, in mastering the ways of the world often regards himself as an example of fallen humanity. Besides offering an approach to Walcott as a poet, dramatist, theater director, arts critic, and teacher, the book shows how his desire to be a painter influenced his vision and the way he works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

From the provinces to Stockholm-a professional career
In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995).

From the provinces to Stockholm-a professional career
In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995). ... Read more

Product Description
The Bounty was the first book of poems 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."
Amazon.com Review
Poet Derek Walcott loves grand themes. In his award-winningepic poem, Omeros, he revisted Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey,relocating them to the Caribbean and peopling them with the poorfishermen and colonials of his homeland. In The Bounty, Walcotttakes the 1787 arrival of that ill-fated British ship on Caribbeanshores as the starting point for an elegiac meditation on life, art,and identity. In the collection's first poem, "The Bounty,"Walcott remembers his mother who "lies/near the white beachstones"; the bounty he finds in his homeland, St. Lucia, is morethan just the breadfruit brought to the Islands by the H.M.S. Bountytwo centuries ago; it is the "thorns of the bougainvillea,"and the industry of ants.

The Bounty is both an elegy forthe poet's mother and for himself--for the land he left behind and theidentity he shed as a result. In these poems, St. Lucia becomes allthe more precious because Walcott can't go home again. Rich inimagery, these poems evoke the essence of the islands with each line. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A book of elegies, full of death, sadness and simple faith.
Walcott's photograph on the back of the 1st edition sums up the feeling ofBounty- Sorrow, the grief of the death of friends and loved ones, faith inGod seen "as through a glass darkly", the exhaustion of asensitive man aware of his own mortality. Yet, through it all is the greatsense of gratitude for the folk culture of the country that has nurturedhim. And if he will not make great declarations of religious faith, he isthankful for the sun on the leaves, the ocean outside his door, the songsof Sessenne the folk singer of St. Lucia. Like Crusoe and Odysseus, thisfortunate traveller has returned to his bench on the edge of the sea underthe breadfruit leaves, "where stars and fireflies breed." Thispoet is past posturing. "The only art left is the preparation ofgrace", and even now, ever the bright eyed poet (behind the tears ofthe aging sage), he is "going down to the shallow edge to beginagain." Walcott's only vocation has been poetry, his universe that ofletters. In this he has never lost his faith.

EACH WORD IS LIKEA VIEW OF CARRIBEAN HEART
READING THIS IS LIKE PAINTING A PORTRAIT .IT GLIMMER LIKE THE JEWEL OF THE CARRIBEANBLUE TONE IS A DEEP PATHOSOF PERSONAL EMOTIONTHAT COME ONLY COME FROM THE PEN OF ONE WHO LOVES HIS HOMELAMD AND WRITE ABOUT IT

Striking imagery
Walcott's poetry sweeps you along on a series of vivid and memorable images that leave you breathless. ... Read more

Product Description
Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time

In the history plays that comprise The Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.

In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.
... Read more

Product Description
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 the most up-to-date guide available for students, scholars and readers of Walcott. Students of Caribbean and postcolonial studies will find this a perfect introduction to this important writer. ... Read more

Product Description
In the Shadows of Divine Perfection provides an examination of Derek Walcott's Omeros(1990)- the St. Lucian poet's longest work, and the piece that secured his Nobel Laureate-that reveals the deep-seated bond between the root narratives of ancient Greece to the cultural products and practices of the contemporary Caribbean. This book presents the first detailed reading of Walcott's highly controversial attempt to craft a Caribbean master narrative. This book also presents an overview of the poem's ideological orientation and a far-reaching critique of current postcolonial theory. Lance Callahan engages some of the most vexing problems of authenticity by reading Walcott's work alongside ancient Greek literature and culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

a reader
The other reviewers are right.Routledge is shirking it's responsibilities by denying the book to those of us who can't afford it.

The Price is Wrong!
$52.00 for a Kindle version of this book is just WRONG.There is no paper.There is no stocking fee.There is no handling.I will not pay $52.00 for someones opinion of a book and if you do not have a Kindle and are paying over $100.00 you are out of your mind!

Routledge should be ashamed of the price
This appears to be an important book about a fascinating poem. But the price, $75 for a short book, is an insult to people who love poetry. It assumes that only academics or people who have access to a university library should be able to read this book. I am going to avoid buying books from Routledge as much as possible until they rethink their pricing.

I hope the author continues to work and finds a new publisher, one that will price books so that the general public can buy them.

Omeros itself is a wonderfully deep and constantly changing poem, worth rereading. ... Read more

Product Description
This text is the result of a commission by the RSC. It shares the Homeric/Caribbean background with Walcott's epic poem "Omeros" which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1990. ... Read more

Product Description
York Notes are guides to literature in English, covering major British, American, Commonwealth and Third World works as well as English translations of some important writings in other languages. The Notes are designed for GCSE and A-level and are tailored to exam requirements. The books provide criticism on specific texts, plus questions. Information on the author and the historical background to the text is given and a specimen essay, commentaries, hints for study and a summary of the text are included. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the address given by Derek Walcott in Stockholm on 10th December 1992, at the ceremony marking his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Ambushed by Derek Walcott...
Almost 40 years ago my friend and mentor, Count Taylor, told me about Derek Walcott (poet, writer, watercolorist) but I'd not read Walcott untiljust now...a serious mistake.

THE ANTILLES: FRAGMENTS OF EPICMEMORY, is just a small book but to read it is to step intoanotheruniverse.Walcott applies layer upon layer of translucent watercolorpigment to an undulating and ever changing canvas...all to the purpose ofseparating the reader from her preconceptions.

Read this and you willnever look at a cruise ship parked in a Caribbean harbor in the same wayagain.

5/24/00

A Challenging Read
This book may seem to be a bit slow at first, but as you get into it further, Walcott's words really start to affect you.His sense of awareness of American perceptions of the Caribbean are dead on, and heexposes them for what they are.Most importantly, he address poetry ingeneral, relating the poetry he writes to the poetry he sees around him. It is in many ways a fierce defense of the beauty and timelessness of bothpoetry, and the Caribbean. In just these short pages I found more food forthought and more things that have gotten me thinking than in many novels orother works I have read recently.Definitely worth it! ... Read more