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The bounty
Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the author's mother, "The Bounty" also contains a haunting series of poems which evoke the poet's native ground, the island of St. Lucia.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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176 people want to read
About the author
Derek Walcott
181 books502 followersDerek 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 19, 2017
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.
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.
February 24, 2018
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."
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."
June 15, 2015
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"
"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"
March 8, 2009
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.
March 21, 2025
This is a re-reading of a book I have loved for many years. It still pierces me, maybe now with even greater force.
February 6, 2024
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!
March 2, 2014
There is a story of resistance behind this book. It appeared on the chaotic book tables at our local giant what-not warehouse and I bypassed it three times before finally picking it up. I knew of Walcott and heard him read once and just never felt connected to his work regardless of his Nobel laureate reputation. And this book was all long lines. Why that would bother me I don't know because Whitman's long lines never bothered me. But I just felt tired even looking at it and so never took it home. --Until it became clear, after probably 6 or more months on that table, that I was the only one who knew that it should be picked up. In the end, I felt sorry for poor neglected Walcott and finally took the book home for .50.
And then it sat on a side table for 6 months. I couldn't put it with the other books because it had caught a case of mildew from its many months at the warehouse. I finally moved it to the read-soon pile just to get it out of the living room and finally picked it up to read with the same get-it-out-of-the-way attitude. So I've been totally uncharitable toward this book and now feel ashamed because if it weren't mildewy, I would have kept it for a future re-read.
It did take some reading to really start appreciating the rhythms in Walcott's lines. And some of the first poems seemed like description going nowhere. But the more I read, the more I began seeing his form and how he was linking sounds. It was only toward the end that I began to wonder if there was also a larger structure to the book that I was missing. Many of the poems merely have numbers as titles. Except for the title poem, which is in tercets, all of the poems are in single stanza blocks of text, of varying length but never more than a page. A few of the poems are divided into sections.
My first quote will be from the title poem, which is an elegy for his mother. This is from section v.:
Like our dread of distance, we need a horizon.
a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbors
though infinity separates them, we can think of only one sun:
all I'm saying is that the dread of death is in the faces
we love, the dread of our dying, or theirs;
therefore we see in the glint of immeasurable spaces
not stars or falling embers, not meteors, but tears.
In this elegy, John Clare is repeatedly invoked as is a "Tom" that I'm unable to place. This invoking of other poets is common throughout this book. I remember being quite startled to see him use Gerard Manley Hopkins' "dawn-drawn" in one. One reason to re-read the book is to pay closer attention to these. He also often makes reference in poems to the writing process or tools, especially paper as though trying to conflate the act of writing with the landscape itself. So I stopped reading this book with the feeling that I had scratched the surface and there was still much to consider. Here are some more excerpts.
From "11":
.... Nada
is the street with its sharp shadows and the vendors quiet
as their yams, and strange to think the turrets of Granada
are nada compared to this white-hot emptiness, or all the white
stone castles in summer, or pigeons exploding into flocks
over St. Mark's, nada next to the stride-measuring egret,
over the stunned bay, and the crash of surf on the rocks.
It is only your imagination that finally ignites it
at sunset in that half-hour the colour of regret,
when the surf, older than your hand, writes: "It
is nothing, and it is this nothingness that makes it great."
The first full sentence of "27":
Praise to the rain, eraser of picnics, praise the grey cloud
that makes every headland a ghost, and the guttering belch-
braided water praise to the rain and her slow shroud,
she is the muse of Amnesia which is another island,
spectral adrift where those we still love exist
but in another sense, that this shore cannot understand,
for reminding us that all substance thins into mist
and has its vague frontiers, the country of memory
and, as in Rimbaud, the idea of eternity,
is a razed horizon when the sky and the sea are mixed
and the solid disappears like the dead into essences
which is the loud message of the martial advancing rain
with its lances and mass and--sometimes alarming our senses--
the kettledrums of advancing thunder. ...
And lastly, all of "34":
At the end of this line there is an opening door
that gives on a blue balcony where a gull will settle
with hooked fingers, then, like an image leaving an idea,
beat in slow scansion across the hammered metal
of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers--
a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily.
In the lilac-flecked distance, the same headlands rust
with flecks of houses blown from the spume of the trough,
and the echo of a gull where a gull's shadow raced
between sunlit seas. No cry is exultant enough
for my thanks, for my heart that flings open its hinges
and slants my ribs with light. At the end, a shadow
slower than a gull's over water lengthens, by inches,
and covers the lawn. There is the same high ardour
of rhetorical sunsets in Sicily as over Martinique,
and the same horizon underlines their bright absence,
the long-loved shining there who, perhaps, do not speak
from unutterable delight, since speech is for mortals,
since at the end of each sentence there is a grave
or the sky's blue door or, once, the widening portals
of our disenfranchised sublime. The one light we have
still shines on a spire or a conch-shell as it falls
and folds this page over with a whitening wave.
And then it sat on a side table for 6 months. I couldn't put it with the other books because it had caught a case of mildew from its many months at the warehouse. I finally moved it to the read-soon pile just to get it out of the living room and finally picked it up to read with the same get-it-out-of-the-way attitude. So I've been totally uncharitable toward this book and now feel ashamed because if it weren't mildewy, I would have kept it for a future re-read.
It did take some reading to really start appreciating the rhythms in Walcott's lines. And some of the first poems seemed like description going nowhere. But the more I read, the more I began seeing his form and how he was linking sounds. It was only toward the end that I began to wonder if there was also a larger structure to the book that I was missing. Many of the poems merely have numbers as titles. Except for the title poem, which is in tercets, all of the poems are in single stanza blocks of text, of varying length but never more than a page. A few of the poems are divided into sections.
My first quote will be from the title poem, which is an elegy for his mother. This is from section v.:
Like our dread of distance, we need a horizon.
a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbors
though infinity separates them, we can think of only one sun:
all I'm saying is that the dread of death is in the faces
we love, the dread of our dying, or theirs;
therefore we see in the glint of immeasurable spaces
not stars or falling embers, not meteors, but tears.
In this elegy, John Clare is repeatedly invoked as is a "Tom" that I'm unable to place. This invoking of other poets is common throughout this book. I remember being quite startled to see him use Gerard Manley Hopkins' "dawn-drawn" in one. One reason to re-read the book is to pay closer attention to these. He also often makes reference in poems to the writing process or tools, especially paper as though trying to conflate the act of writing with the landscape itself. So I stopped reading this book with the feeling that I had scratched the surface and there was still much to consider. Here are some more excerpts.
From "11":
.... Nada
is the street with its sharp shadows and the vendors quiet
as their yams, and strange to think the turrets of Granada
are nada compared to this white-hot emptiness, or all the white
stone castles in summer, or pigeons exploding into flocks
over St. Mark's, nada next to the stride-measuring egret,
over the stunned bay, and the crash of surf on the rocks.
It is only your imagination that finally ignites it
at sunset in that half-hour the colour of regret,
when the surf, older than your hand, writes: "It
is nothing, and it is this nothingness that makes it great."
The first full sentence of "27":
Praise to the rain, eraser of picnics, praise the grey cloud
that makes every headland a ghost, and the guttering belch-
braided water praise to the rain and her slow shroud,
she is the muse of Amnesia which is another island,
spectral adrift where those we still love exist
but in another sense, that this shore cannot understand,
for reminding us that all substance thins into mist
and has its vague frontiers, the country of memory
and, as in Rimbaud, the idea of eternity,
is a razed horizon when the sky and the sea are mixed
and the solid disappears like the dead into essences
which is the loud message of the martial advancing rain
with its lances and mass and--sometimes alarming our senses--
the kettledrums of advancing thunder. ...
And lastly, all of "34":
At the end of this line there is an opening door
that gives on a blue balcony where a gull will settle
with hooked fingers, then, like an image leaving an idea,
beat in slow scansion across the hammered metal
of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers--
a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily.
In the lilac-flecked distance, the same headlands rust
with flecks of houses blown from the spume of the trough,
and the echo of a gull where a gull's shadow raced
between sunlit seas. No cry is exultant enough
for my thanks, for my heart that flings open its hinges
and slants my ribs with light. At the end, a shadow
slower than a gull's over water lengthens, by inches,
and covers the lawn. There is the same high ardour
of rhetorical sunsets in Sicily as over Martinique,
and the same horizon underlines their bright absence,
the long-loved shining there who, perhaps, do not speak
from unutterable delight, since speech is for mortals,
since at the end of each sentence there is a grave
or the sky's blue door or, once, the widening portals
of our disenfranchised sublime. The one light we have
still shines on a spire or a conch-shell as it falls
and folds this page over with a whitening wave.
June 29, 2019
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.
March 1, 2021
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.
July 14, 2017
"an echoing architecture of stanzas"
January 5, 2019
Reading the world in books: Saint Lucia.
Nobel prize. Very much disappointed in his poetry.
Nobel prize. Very much disappointed in his poetry.
March 26, 2021
I still don't like poetry.
April 9, 2021
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.
Read
October 30, 2023for thesis class ( i struggled w/ this one but love Walcott's other poems )
Read
September 16, 2022A tough slog. Dense, serious. Would have liked a bit of humor.
March 30, 2022
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.
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.
September 9, 2023
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.
January 6, 2011
"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.
its sibilants and consonants; a universal metre
piles up these signatures like inscriptions of seaweed"
Just a little taste...beautiful book.
March 10, 2011
This was one of the 1998 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...
June 20, 2012
"you were always happier / with the cold and uncertain edges, not blinding sunlight / on water, in this ferry sidling up to the pier"
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews