Derek Walcott's Books

Conversations with Derek Walcott

By: Derek Walcott

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Conversations with Derek Walcott

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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234

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0878058559

ISBN 13

9780878058556

Another Life

By: Derek Walcott

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Another Life

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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136

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880309

ISBN 13

9781466880306

The Prodigal

A Poem

By: Derek Walcott

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The Prodigal

A Poem

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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115

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880414

ISBN 13

9781466880412

Sea Grapes

By: Derek Walcott

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Sea Grapes

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN 10

1466880449

ISBN 13

9781466880443

Another Life

Fully Annotated

By: Derek Walcott,Edward Baugh,Colbert I. Nepaulsingh

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Another Life

Fully Annotated

By: Derek Walcott,Edward Baugh,Colbert I. Nepaulsingh

This near-definitive study sets a new standard for the kind of meticulous scholarship that Nobel laureate Derek Walcott's poetry deserves, at the same time that it enhances the accessibility of Walcott's history and poetry for the general reader.

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354

Publisher

Lynne Rienner Pub

Published Date

ISBN 10

0894108689

ISBN 13

9780894108686

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

By: Derek Walcott

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The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

By: Derek Walcott

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "He gives us more than himself or ‘a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "In My Eighteenth Year," published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "A Far Cry from Africa," which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "The Schooner Flight" from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "Sixty Years After," from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

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641

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466874457

ISBN 13

9781466874459

Omeros

By: Derek Walcott

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Omeros

By: Derek Walcott

A poem 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.

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340

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374523509

ISBN 13

9780374523503

Midsummer

By: Derek Walcott

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Midsummer

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN 10

1466880430

ISBN 13

9781466880436

The Star-Apple Kingdom

By: Derek Walcott

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The Star-Apple Kingdom

By: Derek Walcott

Most of the poems in this new collection follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with "The Schooner Flight," in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad, sailing northward to meet his fate, and ending with "The Star-Apple Kingdom," a long poem whose axis is the crucial attempt to establish a new social order in Jamaica without sacrificing democracy. Other poems speak through various personae: "Koenig of the River" marks the end of a saga of nineteenth-century exploration and conquest through the Conradian image of a missionary-soldier whose comrades have been lost at sea; "The Saddhu of Couva" describes the lament of an Indian priest for a fading spirituality; "Egypt, Tobago" places Mark Antony on a beach in the glare of afternoon. Two poems are dedicated to fellow poets--Josephy Brodsky and Robert Lowell. In The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott's precise and inventive imagery is enriched by frequent exploitation of the tonal aspects of dialect. He has absorbed into poetry the normal resources of fiction--to the point where fact crystallizes into metaphor. As John Thompson recently commented in The New York Review of Books: "Walcott writes now as a man who knows exactly what he is doing. His style is that of the best language of our period.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN 10

1466880465

ISBN 13

9781466880467

What the Twilight Says

Essays

By: Derek Walcott

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What the Twilight Says

Essays

By: Derek Walcott

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, drawn from pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere. This collection forms 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 made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

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251

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880503

ISBN 13

9781466880504

Tiepolo's Hound

By: Derek Walcott

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Tiepolo's Hound

By: Derek Walcott

From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a 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 found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover 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-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed 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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194

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880481

ISBN 13

9781466880481

Conversations with Derek Walcott

By: Derek Walcott

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Conversations with Derek Walcott

By: Derek Walcott

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234

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0878058559

ISBN 13

9780878058556

The Bounty

Poems

By: Derek Walcott

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The Bounty

Poems

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN 10

1466880325

ISBN 13

9781466880320

Three Plays

The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile

By: Derek Walcott

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Three Plays

The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile

By: Derek Walcott

The three plays in this collection form a triptych--the central play, a farce, is flanked by two dramas. Together they span the last four decades of Trinidad's social and political history, beginning, in The Last Carnival, with the colonial life-style of a French Creole family faced with the emergence of the Black Power movement, and ending, in A Branch of the Blue Nile, with the conflict among members of a small theatre company in contemporary Port-of-Spain. Beef, No Chicken, the middle play, deals with the corruption of a small town in a hurry to catch up with the industrialization that a new highway will bring. The Last Carnival is an entirely new version of Walcott's earlier, unpublished play, In a Fine Castle. It had its American premiere with the Group Theatre Company in Seattle in 1983. Beef, No Chicken premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre's Winterfest series in 1982. A Branch of the Blue Nile was given its Caribbean premiere by State One in Barbados in 1983.

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286

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880473

ISBN 13

9781466880474

The Arkansas Testament

By: Derek Walcott

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The Arkansas Testament

By: Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott's eighth collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, is divided into two parts--"Here," verse evoking the poet's native Caribbean, and "Elsewhere." It opens with six poems in quatrains whose memorable, compact lines further Walcott's continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people. For several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the United States. "The Arkansas Testament," one of the book's long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem's crisis is the taking on of an extra history, one that challenges unquestioning devotion.

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114

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Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880317

ISBN 13

9781466880313

O Starry Starry Night

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

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O Starry Starry Night

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

Two masterful artists—Gauguin and van Gogh—come alive in a vibrant drama about friendship, art, and madness Two painters—Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—are living together in the sleepy town of Arles in 1888. Soon, Gauguin, frustrated by van Gogh's refusal to acknowledge his increasingly troubled mind, will depart for Paris. In two years, van Gogh will be dead by his own hand. In the meantime, the friends discuss their craft; they frequent a local café that van Gogh will soon immortalize; they become acquainted with a young prostitute, Lotte, who becomes Gauguin's lover; they argue; they paint. In Derek Walcott's new historical play, O Starry Starry Night, two world-renowned artists come to life as they wrestle both with grand themes—friendship, loyalty, fame—and with more mundane concerns, money primary among them. The scenes Walcott sketches summon several of van Gogh's most famous paintings: Sunflowers, The Night Café, The Bedroom at Arles. His manipulation of language—van Gogh's eloquent monologues giving way to more abstract speeches—evokes the painter's descent into madness. Over the action hangs the threat of violence, of death, which lends the play a potent urgency; for at least one of the characters, time is quickly running out. O Starry Starry Night is powerfully wrought, and demonstrates once again the sharpness of Walcott's eye: as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, and, above all, as an observer of human follies, foibles, failings, and aspirations.

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113

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374712026

ISBN 13

9780374712020

Gulf and Other Poems

By: Derek Walcott

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Gulf and Other Poems

By: Derek Walcott

As his title suggests, Derek Walcott's new poems--while making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery--are concerned with themes of isolation and the achievement of identity through loneliness. When it was published in England in 1969, The Gulf was awarded the Cholmondeley prize for poetry. As the London Times wrote, "His new collection is as noble and stern and grand as Milton...Walcott writes with a tropical glory of images; handles his huge pyrotechnic vocabulary with iron-discipline , verve and nerve...His glittering intelligence and luxurious command of sensation fuse in a mastery of images which burst in the brain like balls of phosphorescent fire." The subject of the title poem is the alienation and isolation of an America where filling-station signs proclaim the Gulf, an air, heavy with gas sickens the state, from Newark to New Orleans. The central figure in the Caribbean poems is a Robinson Crusoe-like castaway, who "learns again the self-creating peace of islands.

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109

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

146688035X

ISBN 13

9781466880351

White Egrets

Poems

By: Derek Walcott

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White Egrets

Poems

By: Derek Walcott

In 'White Egrets', Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, and more

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103

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374289298

ISBN 13

9780374289294

Marie LaVeau and Steel

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

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Marie LaVeau and Steel

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

When black New Orleans madam and voodoo priestess Marie LaVeau attempts to wrest control of her brothel away from its white financier, she unleashes a racial and religious storm that threatens to consume the city. With his customary feel for character and language, Derek Walcott expertly navigates the territory between two very different sides of New Orleans¿one Christian and the other animist. Using song and humour, Marie LaVeau brilliantly lays bare the absurdities upon which the Old South rested. In Steel, Walcott employs verse, song, and the vernacular to narrate the story of the Bandidos, a group of panband musicians in Trinidad, as they struggle among themselves, do battle with the police, and fight against the weight of their colonial history. Set to the rhythm of the steel drum, this is a paean to the people of the West Indies¿their hardships, their triumphs, and their sense of community; it is also a moving tribute to the political force and redemptive power of art. In these two plays, Walcott brings to bear the lyric force and dynamic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

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240

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374202915

ISBN 13

9780374202910

The Odyssey

A Stage Version

By: Derek Walcott

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The Odyssey

A Stage Version

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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160

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571168566

ISBN 13

9780571168569

Morning, Paramin

By: Derek Walcott Estate

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Morning, Paramin

By: Derek Walcott Estate

A collaboration between one of the world's most eminent poets, Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott, and one of its most coveted painters, Peter Doig. Through a long-standing friendship and creative affinity the two great artists have together produced a stunning full-colour book of fifty paintings and original poems.

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112

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571332064

ISBN 13

9780571332069

The Odyssey

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

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The Odyssey

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

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.

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174

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880384

ISBN 13

9781466880382

Collected Poems, 1948-1984

By: Derek Walcott

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984

By: Derek Walcott

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

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533

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374520259

ISBN 13

9780374520250

Moon-Child

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

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Moon-Child

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

In Moon-Child, 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 this lyrical new work, 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 any of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, the islanders will win the right to spend the rest of their days in wealth and peace. In a fable that reaches from St. Lucia's verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colorful Creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward the island's 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.

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125

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466874449

ISBN 13

9781466874442

Walker and Ghost Dance

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

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Walker and Ghost Dance

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

Two dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Walker and Ghost Dance. On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history. In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

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188

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Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

146688049X

ISBN 13

9781466880498

The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!

By: Derek Walcott

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The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!

By: Derek Walcott

Since 1959, Derek Walcott has directed and written for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The Joker of Seville, a comedy based on Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla, was commissioned by England's Royal Shakespeare Company. Walcott's sensitivity to the pacing, meter, and lyricism of the original makes his first attempt at adaptation an extraordinary accomplishment. O Babylon! brings life the Rastafarian sect in Jamaica, which grew during Marcus Garvey's exile to that country and has recently been popularized through the lyrics of reggae music. Mr. Walcott's plays have been produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Negro Ensemble Company. Dream on Monkey Mountain, the title play of his earlier collection, won the Obie Award for a Distringuished Foreign Play when produced in New York in 1971. It was deemed "a masterpiece" by Edith Oliver in The New Yorker. "Dream on Monkey Mountain," she wrote, "is a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, and poetry is rare in the modern theatre. Every line of it plays....there is a sound psychological basis for every action and emotion.

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244

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880376

ISBN 13

9781466880375

The Haitian Trilogy

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

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The Haitian Trilogy

Plays

By: Derek Walcott

Three plays by the Nobel-laureate Derek Walcott, brought together for the first time in The Haitian Trilogy 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.

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330

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880368

ISBN 13

9781466880368

The Fortunate Traveller

By: Derek Walcott

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The Fortunate Traveller

By: Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was one of the most accomplished and resourceful poets who wrote in English, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The volume of his work in The Fortunate Traveller, which contains such poems as "Olde New England" and "Piano Practice," cements his reputation as a poet who "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries" - Robert Graves

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880341

ISBN 13

9781466880344

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

By: Derek Walcott

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Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

By: Derek Walcott

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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294

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880333

ISBN 13

9781466880337

Remembrance and Pantomime

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

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Remembrance and Pantomime

A Play

By: Derek Walcott

First produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in 1979, Remembrance is the story of an evasively eloquent retired teacher who cannot reconcile his anachronistic love of British culture with the evolution of his family and community in independent Trinidad. "A lyrical, audience-pleasing work" (Variety). Mr. Walcott is a poet, and his writing is of a quality we seldom hear in the theatre" (The New Yorker). Pantomime is a fast-paced comedy set in Tobaco. In the hope of entertaining future guests, an English hotel owner proposes that he and his black handyman work up a satire on the Robinson Crusoe story. The play was produced by BBC Radio and London's Keskidee Theatre in 1979. "A brilliantly extended set of variations on the master-and-servant relationship" (The Times). "Gentle wit, immaculately placed irony" (New Statesman). "Dazzling theatrical virtuosity" (Financial Times).

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154

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466880422

ISBN 13

9781466880429

Selected Poetry

By: Derek Walcott

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Selected Poetry

By: Derek Walcott

A selection of the poetry of Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. The nature of memory and the creative imagination, the history, politics and landscape of the West Indies, Walcott's loves and marriages and his enduring awareness of time and death, are recurring themes.

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164

Publisher

Heinemann

Published Date

ISBN 10

043591197X

ISBN 13

9780435911973

Book's by Derek Walcott

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