Conversations with Derek Walcott

Conversations with Derek Walcott PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878058556
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
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.

Conversations with Derek Walcott

Conversations with Derek Walcott PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878058556
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Another Life

Another Life PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880309
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
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.

White Egrets

White Egrets PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880511
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century—a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and—perhaps most surprisingly—getting older.

The Fortunate Traveller

The Fortunate Traveller PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880341
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
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.

The Prodigal

The Prodigal PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880414
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
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 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 his new work, 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.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374125619
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
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 Writer's Brush

The Writer's Brush PDF Author: Donald Friedman
Publisher: Welcome Books
ISBN: 9780922811762
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Friedman has gathered together reproductions of paintings, drawings and sculpture, many from private collections, by a pantheon of great writers, including Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad.

What the Twilight Says

What the Twilight Says PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880503
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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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. Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. His recent works include Omeros (FSG, 1990) and The Bounty (FSG, 1997). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He lives in New York City and Castries, St. Lucia.

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880333
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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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.

Tiepolo's Hound

Tiepolo's Hound PDF Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880481
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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 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.