Derek Walcott

The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora. Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams. Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world. Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country’s first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.

The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora. Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams. Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world. Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country’s first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like 'In My Eighteenth Year', published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like 'A Far Cry from Africa', which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like 'The Schooner Flight' from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender 'Sixty Years After', from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott has grappled with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "In My Eighteenth Year," published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "A Far Cry from Africa," which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "The Schooner Flight" from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "Sixty Years After," from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in themes of inspiration with historical intersections of one of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century. The award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, assemble an esteemed literary congregation, with original poems by Chris Abani, Rita Dove, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ed Roberson, Aracelis Girmay, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more. With a powerful foreword by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and stunning visual reproductions of select Bearden masterpieces, this anthology fuses art and literature, standing as a testament to Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world.

Two masterful artists--Gauguin and van Gogh--come alive in a vibrant drama about friendship, art, and madness Two painters--Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh--are living together in the sleepy town of Arles in 1888. Soon, Gauguin, frustrated by van Gogh's refusal to acknowledge his increasingly troubled mind, will depart for Paris. In two years, van Gogh will be dead by his own hand. In the meantime, the friends discuss their craft; they frequent a local caf that van Gogh will soon immortalize; they become acquainted with a young prostitute, Lotte, who becomes Gauguin's lover; they argue; they paint. In Derek Walcott's new historical play, O Starry Starry Night, two world-renowned artists come to life as they wrestle both with grand themes--friendship, loyalty, fame--and with more mundane concerns, money primary among them. The scenes Walcott sketches summon several of van Gogh's most famous paintings: Sunflowers, The Night Caf , The Bedroom at Arles. His manipulation of language--van Gogh's eloquent monologues giving way to more abstract speeches--evokes the painter's descent into madness. Over the action hangs the threat of violence, of death, which lends the play a potent urgency; for at least one of the characters, time is quickly running out. O Starry Starry Night is powerfully wrought, and demonstrates once again the sharpness of Walcott's eye: as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, and, above all, as an observer of human follies, foibles, failings, and aspirations.

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "In My Eighteenth Year," published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "A Far Cry from Africa," which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "The Schooner Flight" from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "Sixty Years After," from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

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.

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time's cunning passages, the poet's place in all of this - with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.

Walcott ble vinneren av Nobels litteraturpris i 1992. Han er uten tvil en av vårt århundres mest betydelige diktere på det engelske språk. Hans ofte dramatiske og fortellende poesi har sitt utspring i det karibiske arkipelet med dets menneskeskjebner og både dystre og farverike historie under det britiske imperiets tid. Walcott er i like høy grad en internasjonal poet, en dikter i moderne eksil som utviklingen har gjort hjemløs. Det foreliggende utvalg utgjør et tverrsnitt av Walcotts diktning fra debuten i 1962 frem til samlingen "The Arkansas Testament" fra 1987.

Skuespillet er lagt til Trinidad. Året er 1970, og en væpnet revolusjon er brutt ut hos den afrikanske befolkningen, men revolten bekjempes militært av regimet. Befolkningen, en etnisk blanding av engelsk, spansk, fransk, indisk, kinesisk, afrikansk, er splittet, men karnevalet går sin gang. Et karneval som ikke bare er en fest, men som fokuserer hele øyas historie, dens mangfold og indre spenninger. Walcott mottok Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1992.

This new Selected Poems offers an ordered retrospective of the fertile career of Derek Walcott, spanning six decades and drawing on twelve collections. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Walcott has, in the words of Seamus Heaney, 'moved with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it.'

Omeros er skrevet på et forrygende energisk, smukt og charmerende kreoler-engelsk. Bogens titel henviser til de syv have, der omgiver øen St. Lucia i Caribien. Langdigtets handling foregår i vores dage i et ørige parallelt med det klassiske Hellas. Tre hovedtemaer væver sig ind og ud af hinanden: Achilleus og Homer elsker begge den gudeskønne Helena; det irske ægtepar Plunkett bor på øen og tvinges til at forsone sig med historien om den britiske kolonisering; den indfødte fortæller kommenterer handlingen i digtet og foretager adskillige transatlantiske rejser og vandringer. Handlingen springer i tid mellem vore dage og fortidige konflikter i Caribien og Afrika og mellem briternes, hollændernes og franskmændenes kampe om overherredømme og slaveri i området. Mod slutningen antydes det, at fortælleren kan vende hjem til sin ø, der ikke kan og skal renses for fortidens uhyrligheder, men netop dyrkes for sin frodige blanding af afrikanske, indiske og engelske rødder.

Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work. Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his later major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In this book of poems, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureateOn a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In "Ghost Dance," first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history. In "Walker," an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

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.