Amazon.com
Poet Derek Walcott loves grand themes. In his award-winning epic poem, Omeros, he revisted Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, relocating them to the Caribbean and peopling them with the poor fishermen and colonials of his homeland. In The Bounty, Walcott takes the 1787 arrival of that ill-fated British ship on Caribbean shores as the starting point for an elegiac meditation on life, art, and identity. In the collection's first poem, "The Bounty," Walcott remembers his mother who "lies/near the white beach stones"; the bounty he finds in his homeland, St. Lucia, is more than just the breadfruit brought to the Islands by the H.M.S. Bounty two centuries ago; it is the "thorns of the bougainvillea," and the industry of ants.
The Bounty is both an elegy for the poet's mother and for himself--for the land he left behind and the identity he shed as a result. In these poems, St. Lucia becomes all the more precious because Walcott can't go home again. Rich in imagery, these poems evoke the essence of the islands with each line.
From Library Journal
This volume is Nobel Prize winner Walcott's first since the widely lauded Omeros (Farrar, 1990), and perhaps his best since the outstanding Midsummer (LJ 1/84). Here, in the long title poem, he salutes the memory of his mother, whose "lessons" allowed him "to write of the light's bounty on familiar things." The remainder of the book is given to expertly turned meditations on love, history, memory, and reading. Walcott never succumbs to the poet's fondness for travelog or book report; the unquiet mind that unifies these poems makes them continuous parts of one of the greatest poetic achievements of our century. In an age of demotic and bare poetry, he is insistent upon eloquence and even sublimity; his "great themes of exaltation" find form in Dante's terza rima and brilliantly oblique slant rhyme. Walcott, who divides his time between Trinidad and Boston, has long given passionate expression to "the heart's salt history"?for him, the uneasy reconciliation of the dazzling Caribbean with the cooler comforts of Western culture. Here, with poignant strangeness, he finds his rest beyond even poetry, in "that elate dissolution which goes beyond happiness." Essential.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
