Derek Walcott

Glyn Maxwell

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

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

This retrospective collection includes most of the poems from each of the poet's previous books, as selected by the poet, and the complete text of "Another Life," a long narrative poem

Collected Poems, 1948-1984

A collection of new poetry explores the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the author's love of Western literature, the wisdom that comes with age, the strange joys of new love and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world. By a Nobel Prize-winning poet.

Poems

White Egrets

Essays

What the Twilight Says

A compelling compilation of poetry draws from every stage in the Nobel laureate's work to present a selection that includes "A Far Cry from Africa," A City's Death by Fire," passages from Omeros, and other poetry from his later works reflecting on the Caribbean's colonial legacy, Western literary tradition, the pain of time and mortality, and the poetic craft.

Selected Poems

Displaying Walcott's characteristic blend of soaring imagery and plain fact, this sequence of fifty poems explores such themes as the relationship of poetry to painting and the pull of sea, family, and friendship

Midsummer

عودة أوليس

Another Life

Ti-Jean and His Brothers

Arkansas Testament

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.

Fully Annotated

A Poem

Prodigal

Sea Grapes

Pantomime

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."

The Bounty

Derek Walcott's Omeros is 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.

Omeros

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.

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

Three Plays

Two Plays

The Joker of Seville & O Babylon!

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."

Derek Walcott

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