Walcott, at honorary dinner, Amsterdam, May 20th 2008, Photo Credit: Bert Nienhuis

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 [January 23] in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolorist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.

Walcott has been an assiduous traveler to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992 was awarded to Derek Walcott "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment".

The above is from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

This autobiography/biography was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.

In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, and the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry, White Egrets.

 

Moon-Child: A Play
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Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 5, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374533393
ISBN-13: 978-0374533397
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.3 inches

In Moon-Child, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott returns to the island of St. Lucia for a lush and vivid tale of spirituality and the supernatural. In this lyrical new work, the crafty Planter (who may or may not be the Devil in disguise) schemes to take over the island for development. Between him and his goal lies the Bouton family, whose ailing matriarch strikes a bargain: if any of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, the islanders will win the right to spend the rest of their days in wealth and peace.

In a fable that reaches from St. Lucia’s verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colorful Creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward the island’s postcolonial legacy and complex racial identities, Moon-Child marks a remarkable new addition to the canon of one of the world’s most prolific Caribbean playwrights.

 

White Egrets: Poems
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 15, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374532702
ISBN-13: 978-0374532703
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches

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.

 

Selected Poems
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Hardcover: 328 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 9, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374260664
ISBN-13: 978-0374260668

"No poet rivals Mr. Walcott in humor, emotional depth, lavish inventiveness in language or in 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 . . . [His poetry] makes us realize that history, all of it, belongs to us." 'The New York Times

This career-spannning retrospective, culled from nearly 50 years of work, will go a long way toward reminding readers of the breadth and depth of Nobel laureate Walcott's achievement. Though he is perhaps best known for his modern epic, Omeros, which tells a Homeric tale set in St. Lucia, Walcott is a fine lyric poet as well, writing in traditional forms and meters as well as in powerful free verse. Alongside the epic tone that he brought into modern verse

I sing of Achille, Afolabe's son,
who never ascended in an elevator

is lustful writing about a woman humming Bob Marley on a bus, a casual description of being mugged in Greenwich Village or a painter's-eye view of a fish. The political Walcott is also here; observing a crowd listening to a politician, he writes,

Who will name this silence
respect? Those forced, hoarse hosannas
awe?"

The lyric Walcott is well represented, but the long poems which are necessarily excerpted'prove more problematic. At best, the editor can hope that readers, hooked by one of these narrative poems, will be compelled to seek out the complete version. Nonetheless, this book represents a milestone in the career of a major writer.
'Copyright ' Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 

The Haitian Trilogy: Plays: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth
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Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 15, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374528136
ISBN-13: 978-0374528133
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8 inches

Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time

In the history plays that comprise The Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.

In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.

 

Omeros
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Paperback: 325 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 1, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374523509
ISBN-13: 978-0374523503

This magnificent modern epic by poet-playwright Walcott ( The Arkansas Testament ) follows the wanderings of a present-day Odysseus and the inconsolable sufferings of those who are displaced and traveling with trepidation toward their homes. Written in seven circling books and magically fluid tercets, the poem illuminates the classical past and its motifs through an extraordinary cast of contemporary characters from the island of Santa Lucia: humble fishermen Achilles, Philoctete and Hector; a feverishly beautiful house servant, Helen, who incites her own Trojan War; a local seer, Seven Seas; and the narrator himself, who wanders to the States, to Europe and back again although he knows, "the nearer home, the deeper our fears increase, / that no house might come to meet us on our own shore." Singularly ambitious, and as moving as the works of its namesake, Omeros (Greek for "Homer") remains accessible despite its complexity and divergent strains, which include the privations of Native Americans, African natives and exiled English colonials.  'Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 

Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays
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Paperback: 326 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 1, 1971)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374508607
ISBN-13: 978-0374508609

"Dream on Monkey Mountain is a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, and poetry is rare in the modern theatre. Every line of it plays...there is a sound psychological basis for every action and emotion."'Edith Oliver, The New Yorker

 

Tiepolo's Hound
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 15, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374527792
ISBN-13: 978-0374527792

After writing the Odyssey of his native St. Lucia with Omeros (1990), the epic poem that helped earn him the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott has increasingly sought to sensualize the Caribbean landscape within the competing contexts of colonialism, history and Western artistc traditions. The dual narrative of his latest book-length poem looks at these inheritances by intertwining the career of impressionist Camille Pissarro, who was a Sephardic Jew from St. Thomas, with the poet's own quest to revisit a Venetian painting, of a hound, he once saw in New York. As a painter himself, Walcott associates his narrator's artistic island origins with Pissarro's in smooth, masterful couplets:

I still smell linseed oil in the wild views
Of villages and the tang of turpentine... Salt wind encouraged us, and the surf's white noise.

As the poet makes his way toward Venice and "Tiepolo's Hound," his journey mirrors Pissarro's transition from St. Thomas to Europe. Place names serve as the poem's focal points, forming an extended near-sestina: the names Pontoise; Paris; the Seine; St Thomas's Dronningens Street and Charlotte Amalie; and the ubiquitous "Tiepolo's ceiling" appear again and again.

While the repetitions give a powerful sense of cultural geography, Walcott is not committed to giving us his characters' whole story, but rather a sort of embellished art-history-in-verse, as he imagines Pissarro in Paris, or how Pissarro would have painted slaves, "the umber and ebony of their skin." The narrator's eventual reunion with the painting thus proves something of an anti-climax, as he hasn't generated enough psychological tension to sustain an epic. Still, Walcott's majestic linguistic vistas will be more than enough to carry readers through gorgeously imagined encounters with painters, painting and the visual nostalgia of the exile.  'Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.