Derek Walcott
Description
Derek Alton Walcott is a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, Saint Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He is best known for his epic poem Omeros, an allusive, loose reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey within the Caribbean and beyond to the Africa, New England, the American West, Canada, and London (with frequent reference to the Greek Islands). Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remains active with its Board of Directors. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981 with the hope of creating a home for new plays in Boston, Massachusetts. Walcott retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University in 2007. In fall 2009, he will commence a three year distinguished scholar in residence position at University of Alberta. He continues to give readings and lectures throughout the world. He divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City. Source and more information
Books
Another life
From the author of the acclaimed Burke series: a searing new novel that follows a band of homeless outcasts on a journey to recover what each has lost.Ho was a revered sensei, but when his dismissive arrogance caused the death of a beloved student, he renounced not only his possessions but also his role as master, and now roams the streets in search of a way to atone. Drawn by his presence, a group forms around him: Michael, an addicted gambler who has lost everything, including himself; Ranger, a Vietnam veteran with a tenuous grip on reality; Lamont, a once-fearless street-gang warlord turned hopeless alcoholic; Target, a relentless "clanger" who speaks only by echoing the sounds of others; and Brewster, an obsessive collector of hardboiled paperbacks he stashes in an abandoned building that even vermin avoid.Late one night, Michael spots a woman in a white Rolls-Royce throwing something into the river. Convinced that the woman is a perfect blackmail target, he attempts to recruit the others to search for her. But news that Brewster's library is slated for demolition turns this halfhearted effort into a serious mission to find the ultimate problem-solver: money, and with it a new home for Brewster's precious collection.Each frantic knock opens another barred door as the building's destruction draws nearer. And the answers to each man's questions trigger shocking explosions that hit you with all the visceral power we have come to expect from this fierce and dynamic writer.From the Hardcover edition.
Selected poems
Omeros
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.
The prodigal
Work
In this story of a woman's search for a meaningful life, Alcott moves outside the family setting of her best knows works. Originally published in 1872, Work is both an exploration of Alcott's personal conflicts and a social critique, examining women's independence, the moral significance of labor, and the goals to which a woman can aspire. Influenced by Transcendentalism and by the women's rights movement, it affirms the possibility of a feminized utopian society.
Tiepolo's hound
"Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris, while the poet himself 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-six 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Prentice Hall Literature - Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes - The British Tradition
O Starry Starry Night
"A new play by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, exploring the fraught friendship between master painters Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin"--
White egrets
In this work, the poet 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, he creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. This work 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.
Prentice Hall literature
The Haitian trilogy
"In the history plays that compose The Haitian Trilogy - Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haitian Earth - Derek Walcott uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion."--BOOK JACKET.
Prentice Hall Literature--World Masterpieces
9-10th grade