The Bounty: Poems

by Derek Walcott

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."

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Classics, Post Colonial

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Reviews

[C. Hollis Crossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are two ways to read these poems. One is to move slowly through each dense line, extracting the meaning, unearthing every allusion and metaphor, savoring the challenge of encountering poems of such power and of such strange beauty. The other is simply to read the poems, moving from line to line in search only of the music of Walcott's language, gathering impressions rather than answers.

With Derek Walcott's poetry, either approach is equally valid. The poems in The Bounty are at once learned and visceral, and will reward all who come to them, no matter who they are or what they hope to take away. The book opens with a seven-cycle poem about the death of the poet's mother and his consequent loss of faith, and while he nominally moves away from this theme, most of the poems in this collection are reflections on loss, sadness, depression, conflict, or some variation of these.

Probably the most striking aspect is Walcott's ability to make nature his explanatory voice—why say with your own tongue what flowers, insects, palm trees, and the ocean can say for you? We see in the flora of his native St. Lucia all the emotions of grief and hope and anger; we see in the birds of every place he's been the things that make us human; we see in recurring images of water both the gravity of existence now and the uncertainty of existence yet to be. These are not mere tricks; for Walcott, they are reflections of the truths rewarded to those who seek them.

Sometimes it seems like Walcott cares more about saying something beautiful than he does about saying something profound, and that's probably true. Not all of these poems has a clear meaning, certainly not one to be grasped after cursory reading. But all of them rings true despite this. And even if they didn't, they all sound beautiful, and sometimes that's all the excuse you need to read them.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled at times with Walcott's long lines and my lack of knowledge of the flora in his poems; however, I'm definitely glad I read it.

I particularly enjoyed the second section of Homecoming where he declares "casuarinas--they are as alien as olives--," and poem 27, "Praise to the rain, eraser of picnics, praise the grey cloud."

[Krishna Avendaño · Rating 2 out of 5]

Derek Walcott publicó "La abundancia" poco después de ganar el Nobel en 1992. Comienza con una elegía para su madre pero también funciona como una oda a su tierra natal, Santa Lucía. William Logan describió a la perfección este libro. Lo cito:

"Walcott puede llenar un poema con alusiones como si estuviera rellenando un pavo de Navidad (...): está tan ocupado con la seducción que a veces olvida que el poema tiene un lugar adónde ir".

"A pesar de su fluido y engañoso lenguaje, a pesar de una carrera incansable en sus formas, Walcott ha escrito pocos poemas memorables como poemas. Hay una escritura intoxicante, con cientos de imágenes impactantes, pero raramente un poema que se fije en la memoria"

"Walcott tiene que esforzarse demasiado para escribir mal. Su retórica es tan poderosa como una trompeta, pero cada verso tiene el mismo énfasis: rara vez sabes dónde están los crescendos porque todos son crescendos"

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understand Walcott is kind of the poster boy for post-colonial studies. And for good reason. There is no end to the complicated juxtaposition that he presents in his books. The Bounty continues that continuing shift over the Atlantic Ocean, varying between Santa Cruz and London, or Italy. But I would actually be more interested in setting this book in the context of some kind of eco-poetics. Considering Walcott's dense imagery, and his overall proposition that out of death there comes life. Yes, this is no great revelation, except he touches on how death, in his elegy, makes the life and energy of the poems. Walcott handles this concept with care and respect and complexity.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a re-reading of a book I have loved for many years. It still pierces me, maybe now with even greater force.

[Gareth Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derek Walcott is one of my favourite poets. Omeros is an epic of the Caribbean, and he is the islands’ Homer. This collection is a lament to his mother in a series of refractions.Having recently read Clive James on death and regret, it is interesting to compare Walcott’s take on the great inevitability of human ending. He draws on much else besides, crafting incandescent phrases to convey subtleties of meaning that leave me gasping and just a little wiser. Only the structure and lay out of this collection jarred a little. Nevertheless, I will always be fond of The Bounty because Walcott signed my copy!

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, I don't usually cry at books, and The Bounty: Poems got me anyway, on a train, in front of strangers. Derek Walcott writes a friendship between two old guys that feels so lived-in, with the bickering, the shared silence, the "you want the last pickle?" kind of love, that the ending knocked the wind out of me. A couple of the flashbacks drag. Perfect for anybody who misses somebody. Not for readers looking for something light.

[Ania Marci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prima luce è una raccolta di poesie sul morire; Walcott ci racconta della morte della madre, della malinconia delle assenze, della nostalgia e del ricordo, ma soprattutto si conferma ai miei occhi un abile artigiano della parola e un grandissimo “pittore” paesaggistico. Le sue poesie mi fanno sentire dentro una cartolina.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entirely agreeable way to spend a Sunday—decamped my noggin from contemporary California to a long past Caribbean. Vivid imagery and a splendid way with words, there’s no downside to this collection.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

"an echoing architecture of stanzas"

[Virginie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading the world in books: Saint Lucia.

Nobel prize. Very much disappointed in his poetry.

[Elspeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I still don't like poetry.

[Jesse Hassinger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection just didn’t speak to me. The themes, the writing, and the style didn’t connect. Oh well. I’ll give him a try again one day and see if my connection with him changes.

[Jenna Murray]

for thesis class ( i struggled w/ this one but love Walcott's other poems )

[Clare]

A tough slog. Dense, serious. Would have liked a bit of humor.

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbors,
in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons

left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labors
of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence,
shadow and light, who live next door like neighbors,

and in sardines with pepper sauce.

Notes: Wonderful on, as Joanna Newsom would say, how “we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words, while across the sky sheet the impossible birds in a steady, illiterate movement homewards.”

These lines flung for sprats or a catch of rainbow fishes,
the scarlet snapper, the parrot fish, argentine mullet,
and the universal rank smell of poetry, cobalt sea,
and self-surprised palms at the airport; I smell it,
weeds like hair swaying in water, mica in Sicily,
a smell older and fresher than the Norman
cathedrals,
or restored aqueducts, the raw hands of fishermen
their anchor of dialect, and phrases drying on walls
based in moss. These are its origins, verse, they remain
with the repeated lines of waves and their crests, oars
and scansion, flocks and one horizon, boats with keels
wedged into sand, your own island or Quasimodo’s
or Montale’s lines wriggling like a basket of eels.
I am going down to the shallow edge to begin again,
Joseph, with a first line, with an old net, the same expedition.
I will study the opening horizon, the scansion’s strokes of the rain,
to dissolve in a fiction greater than our lives, the sea, the sun.

[Nicholas Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book of poems as usually from the man once thought 'the best living poet' when he was alive. It opens with a look at the impact of modern day tourism on the Caribbean, linking it to the imperialism that once, and probably still, governs the islands. The book gets its title quite early from the bounty of bougainvillea marking his mother's grave, a memory that takes him to Europe to remember his sojourns there, yet always likening it to his known Caribbean space. It is a memory blurred by time though saved by nostalgia, as he says so eloquently, "I cannot recall the name of that seacoast city/but it trembled with summer crowds...", a verse that characterizes the poignancy of his thought.

[whimsicalmeerkat · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All of these waves crepitate from the culture of Ovid,
its sibilants and consonants; a universal metre
piles up these signatures like inscriptions of seaweed"

Just a little taste...beautiful book.

[RUSA CODES · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the 1998 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...

[missy jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

"you were always happier / with the cold and uncertain edges, not blinding sunlight / on water, in this ferry sidling up to the pier"