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CASTAWAY
When 'In a Green Night' appeared, Derek Walcott was at once recognized as a poet of importance. Robert Graves wrote that 'Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.' Charles Causly called him 'a new poet of imaginative energy and power', and P.N. Furbank spoke of his 'immense freshness and verve'.
In this new book Walcott is again an interpreter between the Old World and the New. Making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery, he is mainly concerned with the themes of isolation, and the resolution of identity through lonliness. In some of the poems a Crusoe figure appears, and is seen as a second Adam, the bearer of an older culture and the first craftsman of the New World. Others are about America, especially New York, and that contrast of climate and cultures with which he is much concerned. It truly has been said of him, 'History has made him a citizen of the world.'
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies, he was in 1957 awarded a Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theatre. Two of his one-act plays have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
In this new book Walcott is again an interpreter between the Old World and the New. Making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery, he is mainly concerned with the themes of isolation, and the resolution of identity through lonliness. In some of the poems a Crusoe figure appears, and is seen as a second Adam, the bearer of an older culture and the first craftsman of the New World. Others are about America, especially New York, and that contrast of climate and cultures with which he is much concerned. It truly has been said of him, 'History has made him a citizen of the world.'
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies, he was in 1957 awarded a Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theatre. Two of his one-act plays have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
2 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Derek Walcott
181 books500 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 of 1 review
January 24, 2022
The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel
Of a sail.
The horizon threads it infinitely.
Action breeds frenzy. I lie,
Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,
Afraid lest my own footprint multiply.
Blowing sand, thin as smoke,
Bored, shifts its dunes.
The surf tires of its castles like a child.
The salt green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,
A net, inches across nothing.
Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly's head is filled.
Pleasures of an old man:
Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.
In the sun, the dog'd faeces
Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.
If I listen I can hear the polyp build,
The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
Godlike, annihilating godhead, art
And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,
The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot,
That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,
Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched seawood nailed and white as a man's hand.
* * *
Something removed roars in the ears of this house,
Hangs its drapes windless, stuns mirrors
Till reflections lack substance.
Some sound like the gnashing of windmills ground
To a dead halt;
A deafening absence, a blow.
It hoops this valley, weighs this mountain,
Estranges gestures, pushes this pencil
Through a thick nothing now,
Freights cupboards with silence, folds sour laundry
Like the clothes of the dead left exactly
As the dead behaved by the beloved,
Incredulous, expecting occupancy.
* * *
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.
To change your language you must change your life.
I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues
Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.
One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.
I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.
At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,
even how they died. On fire,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
of earth,
that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.
All its indifference is a different rage.
Of a sail.
The horizon threads it infinitely.
Action breeds frenzy. I lie,
Sailing the ribbed shadow of a palm,
Afraid lest my own footprint multiply.
Blowing sand, thin as smoke,
Bored, shifts its dunes.
The surf tires of its castles like a child.
The salt green vine with yellow trumpet-flower,
A net, inches across nothing.
Nothing: the rage with which the sandfly's head is filled.
Pleasures of an old man:
Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.
In the sun, the dog'd faeces
Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.
If I listen I can hear the polyp build,
The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
Godlike, annihilating godhead, art
And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,
The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly and maggot,
That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,
Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched seawood nailed and white as a man's hand.
- The Castaway, pg. 9-10
* * *
Something removed roars in the ears of this house,
Hangs its drapes windless, stuns mirrors
Till reflections lack substance.
Some sound like the gnashing of windmills ground
To a dead halt;
A deafening absence, a blow.
It hoops this valley, weighs this mountain,
Estranges gestures, pushes this pencil
Through a thick nothing now,
Freights cupboards with silence, folds sour laundry
Like the clothes of the dead left exactly
As the dead behaved by the beloved,
Incredulous, expecting occupancy.
- Missing the Sea, pg. 24
* * *
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.
To change your language you must change your life.
I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues
Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.
One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.
I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.
At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,
even how they died. On fire,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
of earth,
that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.
All its indifference is a different rage.
- Codicil, pg. 35-36
Displaying 1 of 1 review