Bücher von Derek Walcott

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, drawn from pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere.This collection forms 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 made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

The Bounty was the first book of poems Derek Walcott published after winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the poet's mother, the book features a haunting series of poems that evoke Walcott's native ground, the island of St. Lucia. "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves," Walcott's great contemporary Joseph Brodsky once observed. "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Derek Walcott's eighth collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, is divided into two parts--"Here," verse evoking the poet's native Caribbean, and "Elsewhere." It opens with six poems in quatrains whose memorable, compact lines further Walcott's continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people.For several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the United States. "The Arkansas Testament," one of the book's long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem's crisis is the taking on of an extra history, one that challenges unquestioning devotion.

Derek Walcott, der große Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts, spricht über die Themen, die sein ganzes Leben begleiten: seine Liebe zur westlichen Literatur, die komplexe Kolonialgeschichte der Karibik, die merkwürdige Erfahrung einer neuen Liebe und die manchmal furchteinflößende Schönheit der Natur. Dabei erweitert er die Möglichkeiten von Reim und Takt, von poetischer Form und Sprache. Entstanden ist ein bewegender Zyklus: Seine Gedichte sind ein Lobgesang auf Schönheit, Liebe, Kunst und - vielleicht am überraschendsten - das Altwerden.

Three plays by the Nobel-laureate Derek Walcott, brought together for the first time in The Haitian TrilogyIn 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.