Collected Poems, 1948-1984

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• Notes: Mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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• ISBN13: 9780374520250

Description

This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

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Customer Reviews

A true Caribbean Genius
...i firmly believe he has reperesented the caribbean in a way no- one has ever done before. Derek Walcott's diction and his superb metaphors are yet to be seen in any other caribbean poet. Yet, like the jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley, Walcott has used his art in such a way that the whole world can identify with his work. His development of major themes such as alienation and cultural identity, Caribbean history , society and development and the pOst colonial era truly represents the region in a realistic way. His poems are truly inspirational and representative of the Caribbean. Walcott's poems are a reseviour for any historian who wishes to know about the history of the Caribbean. One shoud note that Walcott has not only used the english language in his poems but he has created the rhyme and rhythm in such a way to achieve a Caribbean creole(See "Parades Parades"), thus firmly establishing his identity as a caribbean poet and writer.IN CONCLUSION, Walcott is a true genius and we in the caribbean are proud of him.

2001-04-04 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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He didn't win a Nobel Prize for nothing
This cool dude uses language in a way no one else does. He redefines syntax, conventions, the way words are placed together, and forms a new interpretation of phrase-synthesis I can't even begin to describe. Actually, I will. There's lots of surrealism here, but not just for its own sake. There's deep philosophy here too. The sombering tones give the incredulous imagery and abstractionistic logic (this guy's a hard read, as it says in the preface) and language that makes him something like a Sylvia Plath in tuxedo, but with a much wider-spanning genius that gives his poetry a greater variety of elements and vocabulary, and with better breaks and sense of poetic rhythm.

2000-01-02 | Michael (Michael) | Helpful Votes: 18 | Rating: 5

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Walcott's Incomparable Command of the English Language
One cannot recommend this book too highly. It is a certain classic for scores of generations to come. Derek Walcott IS the Carribean. His poems enrich the reader's sense of the Carribean without ever over-sentimentalizing. Walcott's keen observations heighten the familiar, while at times domesticating the exotic. His poem "The Spoiler's Return" is equally humorous and disturbing, as it adresses the social problems of the Carribean, and is best appreciated when read with a Carribean accent. His lines ebb and flow like a tide, but always draw you in and never disappoint. Must read poems of his: "Codicil", "The Spoiler's Return", "LI" (from the Midsummer collection), "The Schooner Flight", "The Fortunate Traveller". If you buy one collection of English poetry published after WWII, this should be the book you purchase. No one alive can make the English language work as powerfully and brilliantly for him/her as Derek Walcott can.

1999-03-28 | Helpful Votes: 15 | Rating: 5

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Walcott is the best living poet in English
It would be no exaggeration to say that Walcott is the greatest living poet writing in English, on account of the richness and originality of his language, the accuracy of his natural and social observations, and the diversity and ambition of his subject matter. Walcott works with traditional meter in rhyme in both a strict sense and a looser and more ground-breaking sense, and he also has a formidable command of free verse techniques.

1997-12-16 | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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A work of genius that brings you in touch with a man's heart
Derek Walcott's "Collected Poems 1948-1984", is a work of literary genius. It is a classic that echoes the works of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and other great poets of the past. Walcott not only echoes their styles, he has embraced them and made them his own; adding his own strong island flavour. So what you get is a very refreshing read full of images and sounds that bombard the senses; carrying you away to another world. This book is a road into the poet's heart which echoes the loves, passions and sorrows of all humanity

1997-01-28 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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White Egrets: Poems

Description

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Omeros

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• Notes: Mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Accustom: NEW
• ISBN13: 9780374523503

Description

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.

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Creating an epic poem based on Homer and Odysseus seems a risky proposition for a modern poet, but Derek Walcott accomplishes the feat with stunning results in Omeros. The title, which is Homer's name in Greek, nods to the wandering and exile of the great poet himself, who learned and suffered while traveling. From there, Walcott takes off to "see the cities of many men and to know their minds." After an exhilarating exploration of tremendous proportions, we learn of the past and the present and ride along the rhythm of the words of Walcott in this amazing text.

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Customer Reviews

classical poetry in our contemporary world
It is an all too uncommon delight to read a contemporary work that contains all the greatness of classical literature, that deserves to be shelved beside Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante. This is such a work. An epic poem that lavishes in the power and stunning beauty of words and images, utterly striking poetry as a mix of classical and modernist literature, reflecting the process of the mind and the process of the literary history. This wonderful poetry, some of the best I've ever read, is used to capture the land and peoples of St. Lucia. The action concerns two men, Achille and Hector, that fight an epic war for the affection of Helen. Woven into the tale, besides the stunning poetry, is the clashing of the races, the condition of the native peoples of the Americas, the nature of war, no longer for women, but for land and national pride. Fascinating epic poetry with stunning imagery of a classical world mixed with our own. The American epic poem. Grade: A

2009-08-15 (Vermont) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Wonderful
This richly allusive poem is an exploration of the colonial experience, primarily from the viewpoint of the dispossessed. While based in Walcott's native St. Lucia, the poem ranges across North America and Europe, and draws on a rich literary heritage. While not strictly speaking an epic by traditional standards, Omeros is epic in scope and ambition. Most of Walcott's characters, including an autobiographical narrator, are individuals in search of a home. The poem itself is an effort to reconcile both the European tradition with the experience of dispossession and enslavement. Walcott calls on Homer, Milton, Joyce, the history of St. Lucia, and many other resources to produce this impressive poem. Walcott's ability to vary his poetry and language across the whole length of the poem is impressive. Parts are intensely lyrical, others witty. The descriptive writing is often superb. A number of sequences, for example, the opening section and the dream voyage of one character to his ancestral Africa are stunning.

2008-11-09 (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Epic
Exploring the relationships between natives, tourists, and nature, Walcott moves beyond just our relationships with one another to create this modern epic. Evocative of the Iliad with its battles between Hector and Achille over the yellow-dressed Helen, Omeros moves beyond just the interactions of the natives to greater themes.

There are many exciting parts to the poem: the beauty of the language, the themes, that it was only on the second time reading Omeros that I realized it rhymed, such is the seeming effortlessness with which Walcott writes. It is a modern epic for the way it is able to really explore human relationships with one another, with the trees, with people invading our indigenous societies.

Walcott manages to focus on a few people in spite of the seemingly huge scope of Omeros, and this makes the book much more deeply enjoyable. I recommend it heartily.

2005-03-14 | Displaced midwesterner (Stanford) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Postcolonial Homer
Walcott confidently feels his way into epic form, borrowing the blind eyes of Homer and tropes from Homer's tales. Jam-packed with craft, OMEROS' Dantesque tercets make hairpin turns on the pinpoints of vowels and consonants. Walcott is nothing if not evocative, calling forth the spirits of breadfruit, waves, Plains Indians, sunken treasure, sea creatures and all his other muses with a music that is beyond sounds.

For all the great poetry, what fans of the modern epic will miss in OMEROS is a narrative through-line. Structurally, it is more like William Carlos Williams' PATERSON or especially Hart Crane's THE BRIDGE, than like THE ILLIAD or THE ODYSSEY. The stories in the poem are given secondary importance to the ideas. While I will not disagree with other reviewers' characterizations of the characters as 'well-developed,' I will say that Walcott gives his characters very little to do. The greatest journey is the one taken by the un-named narrator (who seems to be prowling the University Poet circuit from the Carribean to the U.S. to England). Those who want a story with their modern epic are directed to THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER by James Merrill.

What Walcott offers in place of narrative is recollections, meditations and essays on a post-colonial world. Certain human motifs are bound to repeat, he says, and demonstrates with the story of fishermen Hector and Achille fighting for the island girl in the yellow dress, Helen. To me, Omeros is really a collection of poems in a similar form spiralling around similar themes, taking up each others' melodies in different keys. Like any symphony, it sometimes gets lost. But its individual passages are, more often than not, magnificent -- and beautiful to hear.

2004-01-06 | John Ott (Los Angeles, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 20 | Rating: 4

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The worst poem it has ever been my fire's misfortune to burn
Why is it not possible to bestow 0 stars upon an item? I cannot express deeply enough how horrible this 320-some-odd-page poem is. It is the longest complaint I have ever had to trudge through. That is all it is. One long list of complaints. All the narrator does throughout the piece is whine about the same things. A repetative compliation of meaningless and monotonous rants about where he belongs in life, and what makes them so tedious is the fact that you can never relate to the man, so there is no way to feel remorse. I will admit that there are some eloquent descriptions and very mild humour, but it is not enough to save this tragically wordy, muddled, vague, boring, unoriginal, god-please-take-me-now tribute to an overrated classics writer. Save yourself the long nights and headaches....Stay far, far away!

2003-12-09 | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 1

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Selected Poems

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Customer Reviews

Superb
This really is a wonderful anthology. Baugh is to be congratulated for his selection of Walcott poems. What is most impressive about this book is the remarkable consistency of superb and characteristic poetry from the beginnings of Walcott's career to more recent work. The themes of exile, Walcott's ambivalent relationship with the European canon, and the nature of colonialism run throughout the work. Much of this work is autobiographical, presenting Walcott's remarkable ability to translate personal experience into beautiful language and universal themes.

2009-01-03 (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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GREAT!
I love Derek Walcott, and this is the best collection of his poetry I've ever seen. Amazing editing.

2007-02-19 | college student (Boston, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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The Odyssey: A Stage Version

Description

With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott's new play, commissioned by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros.

Episodes of the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, The Odyssey confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.

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Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros

Description

This analysis of Walcott's "Omeros", argues that the poem is an innovative extension of the epic tradition. The book examines Walcott's writing career and traces his development of devices, themes, techniques and a narrative style essential to epic poetry.

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Customer Reviews

Help from Hamner
Although Derek Walcott's Caribbean meditation on Homer's Odyssey stands by itself as an eloquent and thrilling work of epic poetry, to read it without a helping hand--or book--is to miss many of its riches. In accessible language (no unintelligible academic posturing here), Hamner reveals the allusions and untangles the threads: Homer, history of St. Lucia, Walcott's autobiographical allusions, etc. It can be used while one is reading the poem, or skimmed afterward. (It took me a day.) Either way, it's excellent and readable support.

2000-09-07 | Helpful Votes: 17 | Rating: 5

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