Walcott, Derek

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GREAT!

Selected Poems
Derek Walcott , and Edward Baugh
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Native Guard
Strong Is Your Hold
Thomas Hardy

ASIN: 0374260664
Release Date: 2007-01-09

Book Description

Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

Customer Reviews:

GREAT!.......2007-02-19

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

Average customer rating:

A true Caribbean Genius
He didn't win a Nobel Prize for nothing
Walcott's Incomparable Command of the English Language
Walcott is the best living poet in English
A work of genius that brings you in touch with a man's heart

Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Omeros
What the Twilight Says: Essays
Selected Poems
Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996

ASIN: 0374520259

Book Description

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."

Customer Reviews:

A true Caribbean Genius.......2001-04-04

...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.......2000-01-02

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 own sake. There's deep philosophy here too. The sombering tones give the incredulous imagery and abstractionistic logic (this guy's a hard read, as it says in the preface) and language that makes him something like a Sylvia Plath in tuxedo, but with a much wider-spanning genius that gives his poetry a greater variety of elements and vocabulary, and with better breaks and sense of poetic rhythm.

Walcott's Incomparable Command of the English Language.......1999-03-28

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 ever over-sentimentalizing. Walcott's keen observations heighten the familiar, while at times domesticating the exotic. His poem "The Spoiler's Return" is equally humorous and disturbing, as it adresses the social problems of the Carribean, and is best appreciated when read with a Carribean accent. His lines ebb and flow like a tide, but always draw you in and never disappoint. Must read poems of his: "Codicil", "The Spoiler's Return", "LI" (from the Midsummer collection), "The Schooner Flight", "The Fortunate Traveller". If you buy one collection of English poetry published after WWII, this should be the book you purchase. No one alive can make the English language work as powerfully and brilliantly for him/her as Derek Walcott can.

Walcott is the best living poet in English.......1997-12-17

It would be no exaggeration to say that Walcott is the greatest living poet writing in English, on account of the richness and originality of his language, the accuracy of his natural and social observations, and the diversity and ambition of his subject matter. Walcott works with traditional meter in rhyme in both a strict sense and a looser and more ground-breaking sense, and he also has a formidable command of free verse techniques.

A work of genius that brings you in touch with a man's heart.......1997-01-29

Derek Walcott's "Collected Poems 1948-1984", is a work of literary genius. It is a classic that echoes the works of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and other great poets of the past. Walcott not only echoes their styles, he has embraced them and made them his own; adding his own strong island flavour. So what you get is a very refreshing read full of images and sounds that bombard the senses; carrying you away to another world. This book is a road into the poet's heart which echoes the loves, passions and sorrows of all humanity

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Epic
Walcott's Omeros
Postcolonial Homer
The worst poem it has ever been my fire's misfortune to burn
what you read is true

Omeros
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984
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What the Twilight Says: Essays

ASIN: 0374523509

Amazon.com

Creating an epic poem based on Homer and Odysseus seems a risky proposition for a modern poet, but Derek Walcott accomplishes the feat with stunning 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 and suffered while traveling. From there, Walcott takes off to "see the cities of many men and to know their minds." After an exhilarating exploration of tremendous proportions, we learn of the past and the present and ride along the rhythm of the words of Walcott in this amazing text.

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Epic.......2005-03-14

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.

Walcott's Omeros.......2004-06-27

Omeros ! A treat for the lover of language. Much has been and will be written of this literary challenge : plot, characters, and segueing epic; but little will ever do justice to the heart of the matter,- ( which demands this conscious encomium.)

What for Habermas is the ideal of communicative action is celebrated in Walcott as the action of poetic communication. Walcott paints.

On every page, he offers the reader a life time of disciplined observation - the fruit of which he dispenses with prodigal largesse.

This humble, almost unconscious master of metaphor is able to enter unerringly into the consciousness of things and to emerge from that dive with pearls, whose inner flower-flames he unfurls or explodes in liquid light for the benefit of all.

One wishes that Omeros had remained faithful to its native soil - the simple wisdom of Aristotelian unity. The manifold may well be too vast and seems to dilute the poetic distillation. ( Though the genre itself and Walcott's coupled ethnicity exculpate, one still wishes ...etc.)

The work is all done in and as an act of love; still, a brochetting irk pensiles in the mind :
How can a love so in love with its art and the art of its art be anything but artful.

Anticipating the critics who - like he says elsewhere - would spaniel after him like an old stag to hang their theses on the exclamations of his antlers, Walcott may well have an answer to this and other squibs. His arrowing sea-swift Omeros veers and scales with extra territorial sui generis facticity.

The rich pyrotechnics of his fractaling passion, is, like a flung star, a challenge to young energetic poets like Colin Carberry of Ireland , Kendel Hippolyte and Mc.Donald Dixon from the Islands.

Omeros should hold a prominent place on every bookshelf.

Postcolonial Homer.......2004-01-07

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.......2003-12-09

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!

what you read is true.......2003-04-20

My review title shouldn't be construed as me claiming any knowledge re: Caribbean culture/history, or indeed -any- of the experiences of the disenfranchised peoples this book touches on. All I can say is that the glowing reviews here on Amazon are accurate. Walcott's poetry is supple almost beyond belief: so facile and brilliant that it would stand between the reader and the subject if Walcott himself didn't admit that, yes, he can be awfully facile and brilliant with the English language! The writer walks a dozen dangerous lines - among them, the could-be-precious placing of himself in his own poem - and walks away triumphant from every single challenge.

If you are looking for a linear "story" in the tradition of Homer but transplanted to a Caribbean locale, this isn't it. If however you are looking for great poetry and the understanding of others (and yourself) that great poetry can bring, then it is right here. OMEROS is eminently worth your time.

What the Twilight Says: Essays
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What the Twilight Says: Essays
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984

Conversations With Derek Walcott (Literary Conversations Series)

Omeros

The Bounty: Poems

The Prodigal: A Poem

ASIN: 0374526834

Amazon.com

Derek Walcott's identity as a poet is evident even in his literary criticism. Who else would produce a sentence such as "Let the shaggy, long horde of spiky letters and the dark rumbling of hexametrical phalanxes rise over the outback towards the capital of the English language" to describe the 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 in language as it is in ideas; so much so, in fact, that at times the view is obscured by the verbiage. Nevertheless, beneath the loco rococo turns of phrase Walcott has some serious points to make. In his discussion of V.S. Naipaul, for example, he offers some telling insights into the effects of colonialism on his subject's psyche: "What is the cost to his Indianness of loving 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 both shame and pride. Therefore, the only dignity is to be neither master nor servant, to choose a nobler servitude: writing. The punishment for the choice is the astonishment of gratitude; to be grateful to the vegetation of an English shire. Not to India or the West Indies, but to the sweet itch of an old wound." Walcott praises Naipaul's genius while calling him on his racism, selfishness, and disdain for his roots--in effect loving the sinner while hating the sin. His essay on Joseph Brodsky is an intelligent meditation on the art of translation while "The Muse of History" looks at the influence of history in New World literature. From a discussion of the poetry of Ted Hughes to an open love letter to Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Derek Walcott provides plenty of provocative food for thought wrapped in poetical prose. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

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.

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A book of elegies, full of death, sadness and simple faith.
EACH WORD IS LIKE A VIEW OF CARRIBEAN HEART
Striking imagery

The Bounty: Poems
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984
What the Twilight Says: Essays
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ASIN: 0374525374

Amazon.com

Poet Derek Walcott loves grand themes. In his award-winning epic poem, Omeros, he revisted Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, relocating them to the Caribbean and peopling them with the poor fishermen and colonials of his homeland. In The Bounty, Walcott takes the 1787 arrival of that ill-fated British ship on Caribbean shores 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 beach stones"; the bounty he finds in his homeland, St. Lucia, is more than just the breadfruit brought to the Islands by the H.M.S. Bounty two centuries ago; it is the "thorns of the bougainvillea," and the industry of ants.

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

Book 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."

Customer Reviews:

A book of elegies, full of death, sadness and simple faith........1998-09-27

Walcott's photograph on the back of the 1st edition sums up the feeling of Bounty- Sorrow, the grief of the death of friends and loved ones, faith in God seen "as through a glass darkly", the exhaustion of a sensitive man aware of his own mortality. Yet, through it all is the great sense of gratitude for the folk culture of the country that has nurtured him. And if he will not make great declarations of religious faith, he is thankful for the sun on the leaves, the ocean outside his door, the songs of Sessenne the folk singer of St. Lucia. Like Crusoe and Odysseus, this fortunate traveller has returned to his bench on the edge of the sea under the breadfruit leaves, "where stars and fireflies breed." This poet is past posturing. "The only art left is the preparation of grace", and even now, ever the bright eyed poet (behind the tears of the aging sage), he is "going down to the shallow edge to begin again." Walcott's only vocation has been poetry, his universe that of letters. In this he has never lost his faith.

EACH WORD IS LIKE A VIEW OF CARRIBEAN HEART.......1998-04-23

READING THIS IS LIKE PAINTING A PORTRAIT . IT GLIMMER LIKE THE JEWEL OF THE CARRIBEANBLUE TONE IS A DEEP PATHOSOF PERSONAL EMOTION THAT COME ONLY COME FROM THE PEN OF ONE WHO LOVES HIS HOMELAMD AND WRITE ABOUT IT

Striking imagery.......1997-10-24

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

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

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Nice play
Genius!
Very interesting

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Miguel Street
In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)
Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Omeros
The Lonely Londoners (Longman Caribbean Writers Series)

ASIN: 0374508607

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Nice play.......2007-02-16

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!.......2004-11-27

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

Very interesting.......2001-04-12

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.

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The Odyssey: A Stage Version
Derek Walcott , and Homer
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Pentecost: The Rsc/Allied Domecq Young Vic Season : First Performed at the Other Place, Stratford-Upon-Avon, 12 October 1994 (NHB International Collection)

ASIN: 0374172498

Book Description

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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Scintillating and rapturous

The Arkansas Testament
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Shut Up Shut Down
Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (New California Poetry)
Some Ether: Poems

ASIN: 0374520992

Book Description

Walcott's eight collection of poems is divided into two parts -- "There," verse evoking the poet's native Carribbean, and "Elsewhere."

Customer Reviews:

Scintillating and rapturous.......2004-11-08

I gave this volume to a friend who had no experience of reading poetry (since school, that is), and had asked me what sort of poems he could start with. I pointed out a couple of poems that I thought were highlights, and wished him good luck. When I met up with him a week later, he burst into excited praise for the book. He'd started on the poems I had suggested, and rapidly proceeded to read the whole collection, several times over.
I quite agree with his response - in my early 20s this was one of the books that got me excited in contemporary poets and poetry. While Walcott is not foremost an experimentalist - and he might at odd moments almost be thought a sentimentalist - his sheer joy of craft and wordsmithing is a beautiful, beautiful thing to behold. This book is one of those things that can remind you why life is worth living. It's that good.

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Collected Poems, 1948-84
Derek Walcott
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Créolité and Creolization: Documenta11_Platform3

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Créolité and Creolization: Documenta11_Platform3
Petrine Archer-Straw , Jean BernabE , Robert Chaudenson , Juan Flores , Stuart Hall , Dame Pearlette Louisy , Jean-Claude-Carpanin Marimoutou , Annie Paul , Virginia Perez-Ratton , Ginette Ramassamy , Francois VergEs , Derek Walcott , Gerardo Mosquera , and Isaac Julien
Manufacturer: Hatje Cantz Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3775790845
Release Date: 2003-12-02

Book Description

Increased and accelerated processes of cultural syncretism have produced new configurations of identity for which theories of hybridity, matissage, and cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of a new political philosophy of the Other. Under pressure from localized resistances, these terms no longer provide adequate frameworks for articulating the critical issues of difference and the asymmetry of evolving contemporary cultures. Beginning as a full-fledged literary movement in the late 1980s in the French Caribbean, Craolita ventured into the "chaos" produced by history to reclaim nationalist Creole identities. As a hypothesis of cultural production, the subsequent process of creolization reaches far beyond the plantation cultures of the Caribbean, towards a conceptualization of a non-totalitarian consciousness of preserved diversity that has its contested terrain within language, identity, politics, religion, and culture. Transcending still entrenched postcolonial and imperialist narratives of domination and resistance, center and periphery, creolization as a theory of creative disorder analyses active urban contest and contact zones in flux. It expresses a need for particularization that, by embedding Creole dynamics into sociopolitical and sociolinguistic histories, reformulates territories of art, architecture, dance, film, music, poetry, cuisine, oral literature, magic, and carnival.

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