Walcott Derek

In this lyrical new work, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott returns to the island of St. Lucia for a lush and vivid tale of spirituality and the supernatural. In "Moon-Child", the crafty Planter (who may or may not be the Devil in disguise) schemes to take over the island for development. Between him and his goal lies the Bouton family, whose ailing matriarch strikes a bargain: if either of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, they will win the right to the rest of their days in wealth and peace. In a fable that spans from St. Lucia's verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colourful creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward postcolonial legacy and complex racial identities, "Moon-Child" marks a remarkable new addition to the canon of one of the world's most prolific Caribbean playwrights.

Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first timeIn 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.

With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott's play The Odyssey, commissioned by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros. " The Odyssey features Walcott's] voluptuous metaphor making and severe truth telling."--Time 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 revelers, 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.

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.

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.