Derek Walcott: 23 books

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...

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate 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...

From the Nobel laureate, 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...

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.

Do not diminish in my memory villages of absolutely no importance, ... Hoard, cherish your negligible existence, your unrecorded history of unambitious syntax, your clean pools of unpolluted light over close stones. The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich...

Derek Walcott has for some time been recognized as one of the most accomplished and resourceful poets writing in English. The volume of his work in The Fortunate Traveller, which contains such poems as "Olde New England" and "Piano Practice," cements this reputation.

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...

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...

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...