Walcott's masterpiece, and an epic to rival Homer.
Derek Walcott was born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930. The author of many plays and books of poetry, he was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He now divides his time between homes in St Lucia and New York.
"No poet rivals Mr. Walcott in humor, emotional depth, lavish
inventiveness in language, or the ability to express the thoughts
of his characters and compel the reader to follow the swift
mutations of ideas and images in their minds. This wonderful story
moves in a spiral, replicating human thought, and in the end,
surprisingly, it makes us realize that history, all of it, belongs
to us."—Mary Lefkowitz, "The New York Times Book Review" (an
Editors' Choice/Best Book of 1990 selection)
"Characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands;
black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy
as they go their complicated ways . . . Wit and verbal play . . .
enliven every page of this extraordinary poem . . . A constant
source of surprise and delight from stanza to stanza, a music so
subtle, so varied, so exquisitely right that it never once, in more
than eight thousand lines, strikes a false note."—Bernard Knox,
"The New York Review of Books"
"On
If you can buy only one Walcott title, get this Carribean epic. Farrar will release his newest, The Bounty, in June.
"No poet rivals Mr. Walcott in humor, emotional depth, lavish
inventiveness in language, or the ability to express the thoughts
of his characters and compel the reader to follow the swift
mutations of ideas and images in their minds. This wonderful story
moves in a spiral, replicating human thought, and in the end,
surprisingly, it makes us realize that history, all of it, belongs
to us."-Mary Lefkowitz, "The New York Times Book Review" (an
Editors' Choice/Best Book of 1990 selection)
"Characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands;
black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy
as they go their complicated ways . . . Wit and verbal play . . .
enliven every page of this extraordinary poem . . . A constant
source of surprise and delight from stanza to stanza, a music so
subtle, so varied, so exquisitely right that it never once, in more
than eight thousand lines, strikes a false note."-Bernard Knox,
"The New York Review of Books"
"On
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