The Arkansas Testament

by Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott's eighth collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament , is divided into two parts--"Here," verse evoking the poet's native Caribbean, and "Elsewhere." It opens with six poems in quatrains whose memorable, compact lines further Walcott's continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people. For several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the United States. "The Arkansas Testament," one of the book's long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem's crisis is the taking on of an extra history, one that challenges unquestioning devotion.

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Post Colonial

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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

[Zuberino · Rating 5 out of 5]

ওয়ালকটের কবিতা আপাতঃদৃষ্টিতে দুরূহ, হোক তার চরণের গঠনে বা শব্দচয়নে, তার চিন্তা আর দর্শনে, ভাষার ছন্দ আর ছন্দপতনে। ক্রীতদাসের ঔরসে জন্মানো, তাই ভুলতে পারেন না যে নির্বাসিত আফ্রিকান কৃষ্ণাঙ্গরা কয়েক শতাব্দী ধরে বন্দী ক্যারিবিয়ানের এই অপরূপ কারাগারে। রবিনসন ক্রুসোর মতোই আটকে গেছে, মহাসাগরের দুর্লঙ্ঘ্য প্রতিবন্ধকতা পেরিয়ে ক্রুসো তবু শেষমেষ মুক্তি পেয়েছিল কিন্তু ওয়ালকট আর তার স্বজাতির কোন নির্বাণ নেই। সময় ক্রমশ তাকে শেকড়-বিচ্ছিন্ন করেছে, জাতিচ্যুত হয়ে নানা রক্তের মিশ্রণ ঘটে সে হয়ে গেছে শংকর, ক্রেওল।

"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

ব্রিটিশের দেয়া প্রাতিষ্ঠানিক শিক্ষা, সাগরপাড়ে সূর্যের তীরে সাদা বালু আর শামুক-কাঁকড়াকে সঙ্গী করে বালক পড়ছে আটলান্টিকের অন্যপারে এক ঠান্ডা-শীতল ছোট দ্বীপের গল্প-কবিতা-সাহিত্য, জোরপুর্বক আপন করে নিচ্ছে অপরকে, শিখছে মরে যাওয়া দুই হাজার বছর আগের ল্যাটিন আর গ্রীক, নিজের সংস্কৃতি লোকাচার টিকে আছে শুধু আফ্রিকার প্রতিসৃত স্মৃতিতে। নেকড়ে মানব আর উড়ন্ত ডাইনি আর জঙ্গলের অধীশ্বর পাপা-বোয়ার রূপকথা ঘুরে-ফেরে সেন্ট লুসিয়া দ্বীপের নানী-দাদীদের মুখে। আপন দেব-দেবীর প্রতি শ্বেতাঙ্গদের শ্লেষের বিরুদ্ধে ওয়ালকট রাগতঃ উক্তি - "our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature."

তবুও তিনি তার কাব্যপ্রতিভার বলে, মনিবের শেখানো ভাষার ওপর প্রখর কর্তৃত্বের পুরস্কার হিসেবে দ্বীপপুঞ্জের সীমিত গন্ডি উৎরে যান, হয়ে ওঠেন বিশ্বনাগরিক। ভ্রমণ করেন প্রচুর, পাশ্চাত্যের শ্রেষ্ঠ বিদ্যাপীঠে শিক্ষকতা করেন, লন্ডন আর নিউইয়র্কের সাহিত্যপাড়ার সমাদর কি সম্মানসূচক উপাধি আর ডিগ্রি, সবই লাভ করেন। শেষে স্টকহোম থেকে নোবেলটাও বাগিয়ে ফেলেন। হয়তো আত্মগ্লানিতে ভোগেন কখনো -

"And I had abandoned them, I knew that there
sitting in the transport, in the sea-quiet dusk,
with men hunched in canoes, and the orange lights
from the Vigie headland, black boats on the water;
I, who could never solidify my shadow
to be one of their shadows, had left them their earth..."

তবে কখনোই আত্মপরিচয় বিস্মৃত হন না - আমি তোমাদেরই লোক, আজও সেন্ট লুসিয়ার আর ক্যারিবিয়ানের জয়গানই গেয়ে যাই আমার কবিতায়।

ওয়ালকট কেন পড়ি? স্বর্গীয় পরিপার্শ্বের সমুচিৎ সুচারু বর্ণনার কারণে, তার জড়জগতের মনোরম পৃষ্ঠের নীচে তবুও খেলা করে অতীন্দ্রিয় অনুভূতি। মহাকালের নাবিক তিনি, হোমারের হিরো ইউলিসিসকে যেমন ভূমধ্য থেকে হ্যাঁচকা টানে ক্যারিবীয় সাগরে জন্মান্তর করেছিলেন নির্দ্বিধায়। তার অঞ্চলের জঞ্জেলে ইতিহাস, ভাষা সংস্কৃতি আর জাতিস্বত্তার যে প্যাঁচালো উত্তরাধিকার, সবই ধরা দেয় ওয়ালকটের উপমা-রূপকের জটিল গহীন জালে। কোন ওয়ালকট কবিতা একবার পড়ে পাঠোদ্ধার অসম্ভব, বারংবার পড়া দরকার, সজোর আবৃত্তি করে আর মনে মনে বিড়বিড় আউড়ে। প্রতি পাঠে উঠে আসে নতুন কোন অর্থ, চিরচেনা শব্দই হঠাৎ করে অচেনা আঙ্গিকে ফুটে ওঠে, নতুন আলোয় ঠিকরে পাঠকের মনে তৈরী করে অপ্রত্যাশিত গভীর ব্যঞ্জনা।

ওয়ালকটের অপরাধের সংখ্যাও কম নয়, গত কয়েক বছরে তার গর্হিত অপকর্ম প্রকাশ হয়ে পড়েছে নানা জায়গায়। তবুও কিছু কিছু লেখকের কাছে বারবার ফিরে যাওয়া যায় - আত্মা ও ইন্দ্রিয়ের সুস্বাদু খোরাক মেলে, মন ও মনন বিধৌত হয়, চেতনার চিরস্থায়ী নবান্ন উৎসব চলে তাদের পাতায় পাতায়। গত কয়েক বছরে ওয়ালকট এমনই হয়ে উঠেছেন আমার কাছে। শেষ কথাটা তার থাকুক -

“The Caribbean landscape doesn’t have narrative, it has present tense all the time. There’s a different scansion, a different measure. We don’t have seasons. Everything is bright, all the time. It’s an eternal summer. If you don’t have those divisions that are there in other climates, how do you scan time? What happens to your philosophy? Your history? Your art? You’re working with a perpetual ‘is’, you’re working with renewed astonishment.”

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

To Norline


This beach will remain empty
for more slate-coloured dawns
of lines the surf continually
erases with its sponge,

and someone else will come
from the still-sleeping house,
a coffee mug warming his palm
as my body once cupped yours,

to memorize this passage
of a salt-sipping tern,
like when some line on a page
is loved, and it's hard to turn.

When I was younger and seemingly stuck on a far less appropriate path, I tended towards psyching myself out with lists of classics, prize winners, 'difficult' reads, and other literary establishments leaving their snail trails through my instinctive evaluations of what has to be good, personal evaluation aside. I've been making up for it in recent days with far too many painful revisitings of popularly, and previously personally, lauded figures, ridding myself of ivory tower fetish by demanding each text prove itself without any aid from the status quo chorus. Derek Walcott is one of many with whom my initial engagement is suspect, and so when this less GR-friend evaluated text crossed my path, I picked it up to see whether all my talk about Omeros was, simply, talk. What an unexpected pleasure, then, to find that not only do I still have a taste for poetry, but also that I'd kill for another person in the line of Walcott to win this year's Nobel Prize for Lit. I've found many a person who fits the profile, so now all that's left is for the stodgy pop music inundated gits to humor me a little.

There was never any peace
in the spokes of parasols,

for peace only exists
in the leaf-shadowed prose
of the imaginary republic, its
Impressionist canvases.

There's a particular popular piece of modern poetry that I've been planning to read whose top reviews preen in their abbreviated variations on the theme of 'this isn't poetry', which is so fucking boring that I have to imagine how these people made their way out of elementary school. The whole history of poetry has been nothing more and nothing less than a dramatic series of fuck yous to the previous iterations of such, so to conceptualize poetry as anything other than a responsive crystallization to conscientious antagonism is to further extend Christo-centric creationism into the secular realm. One could say that the poetry is boring or full of itself or isn't too one's aesthetic taste, but to say poetry isn't poetry is to undermine the very point of what constitutes as little more than a physical manifestation of a thought exercise, so if one wants to knock one poet, one better prepare to give up their Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Keats. The fact that Walcott pricks the sensibilities less merely means he's more subtle about his subversion, not less. Folks may compare him to an Elizabethan, but no white person could have ever written "The Arkansas Testament", for no white person will ever give up their whiteness.

Favorites of mine in this collection include "A Latin Primer", "White Magic", "To Norline", "Elsewhere", and "Sunday in the Old Republic", with perhaps the last being my personal especial of note. Pretty much every piece, though, save for perhaps "Steam" (I'm wary of Shoah in poetry composed by someone without personal investment) and "Menelaus (bitter bigotry in more than one sense, and claims of historical accuracy may be cast aside with ease with reference to the Romani), multifariously offers an anachronistically striking scene, whether national or individual, tragedy or lust, the floating gardens colonialism and the svelte truth of postcolonialism. True, I likely favor it for touching upon settings already touched upon by so many white others, but subversion cannot exist in a vacuum, and I don't lack for appreciation when it comes to works grounded solely in Saint Lucia and not in some European house of mirrors. With that, I don't think I've brainwashed myself this time; leastwise, not much.

Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.

I'll be picking up more of Walcott, but his history of sexual assault will moderate the intake accordingly.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is only a small collection but somehow it seems to have within it nearly everything I hoped for. Walcott is such a confident, fluent poet. I can read his opening poem – The Lighthouse – across more than five full pages and only later notice the technique, especially his [near] rhyming of alternate lines, relaxed and unforced. He uses formal structure in diverse ways and for all I know he may strain and suffer to achieve his effects, but the effect is fluid and free. He seems to me to use different voices, and even to borrow a voice if required. I was brought up short, reading Stream, by the conviction that – to me - it sounds as Welsh as Dylan Thomas in its huge, breathless sentences and its sweep from contemporary politics to the almost ritual invoking of a Sixth Century Welsh bard. His poems have very diverse moods, too, from the blokey humour of The Lighthouse, meeting up for a boozy evening with an old pal, to the miserable shambles of an empty Brooklyn apartment in Winter Lamps, the cold and unattractive debris of a failed relationship. In the title poem he seethes with anger and truculence at the racism of the USA’s segregated South, whereas in The Light of the World he brings the warmest sentiments of appreciation and even love to his encounter with the ordinary people of St Lucia on a darkened bus in late evening, returning from a bustling market day. One of my favourite aspects of his writing is the way he can use the space of a poem to tell a story, to carry me along with him and show me unexpected wonders. But while he hints at travelling the globe, he becomes more irritable with distance from the beautiful West Indian islands, more humane and appealing when he returns and this is reflected in this collection. Indeed, in Tomorrow, Tomorrow, he is downbeat about travel:

A world’s outside the door, but how upsetting
to stand by your bags on a cold step as dawn
roses the brickwork and before you start regretting,
your taxi’s coming with one beep of its horn,
sidling to the kerb like a hearse – so you get in.

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

White Magic

for Leo St. Helene

The gens-gagée kicks off her wrinkled skin.
Clap her soul in a jar! The half-man wolf
can trot with bending elbows, rise, and grin
in lockjawed lycanthropia. Censers dissolve
the ground fog with its whistling, wandering souls,
the unbaptized, unfinished, and uncursed
by holy fiat. The island’s griots love
our mushroom elves, the devil’s parasols
who creep like grubs from a trunk’s rotten holes,
their mouths a sewn seam, their clubfeet reversed.
Exorcism cannot anachronize
those signs we hear past midnight in a wood
where a pale woman like a blind owl flies
to her forked branch, with scarlet moons for eyes
bubbling with doubt. You heard a silver splash?
It’s nothing. If it slid from mossed rocks
dismiss it as a tired crab, a fish,
unless our water-mother with dank locks
is sliding under this page below your pen,
only a simple people think they happen.
Dryads and hamadryads were engrained
in the wood’s bark, in papyrus, and this paper;
but when our dry leaves crackled to the deer-
footed, hobbling hunter, Papa Bois,
he’s just Pan’s clone, one more translated satyr.
The crone who steps from her jute sugar sack
(though you line moonlit lintels with white flour),
the beau l’homme creeping towards you, front to back,
the ferny footed, faceless, mouse-eared elves,
these fables of the backward and the poor
marbled by moonlight, will grow white and richer.
Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.

[Robin Helweg-Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walcott writes in a loose, readable style that is rich in rhythm (rather than formal meter) and rhyme (often slant rhyme). His imagery is saturated with the islands of the Caribbean, and his themes are introspection and the description of where he is:
"A panel of sunrise
on a hillside shop
gave these stanzas
their stilted shape."

The Arkansas Testament is divided into "Here" - the Caribbean - and "Elsewhere", the other places he has lived, taught, travelled. The final poem, "The Arkansas Testament" itself, is 24 stanzas of mostly 16 lines each, a description and reflection of being a non-American person of colour in the 1980s Deep South of the US. Whereas "Here" concerns his return to the roots he left as a young man and is comfortable, familiar and nostalgic, "Elsewhere" deals with his adult life and relationships in a way that is never completely settled and grounded - and "The Arkansas Testament" is the most unsettled and unsettling of all.

What I like about the book, and especially the first half, is the sense that the imagery and the versification are harmonious with each other, and are a true expression of the life, language and natural rhythms of the islands. Although not meticulous about formal meter and rhyme the way the British can be, he never slides to free verse the way North Americans do. His "Eulogy to W.H. Auden" contains the lovely statement that Auden knew that "war, like free verse, is a sign // of awful manners."

Walcott's verse is rich, beautiful and memorable. But more, it is a genuinely Caribbean evocation of Caribbean life: people, landscape and history.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The gens-gagée kicks off her wrinkled skin.
Clap her soul in a jar! The half-man wolf
can trot with bending elbows, rise, and grin
in lockjawed lycanthropia. Censers dissolve
the ground fog with its whistling, wandering souls,
the unbaptized, unfinished, and uncursed
by holy fiat. The island's griots love
our mushroom elves, the devil's parasols
who creep like grubs from a trunk's rotten holes,
their mouths a sewn seam, their clubfeet reversed.
Exorcism cannot anachronize
those signs we hear past midnight in a wood
where a pale woman like a blind owl flies
to her forked branch, with scarlet moons for eyes
bubbling with doubt. You heard a silver splash?
It's nothing. If it slid from mossed rocks
dismiss it as a tired crab, a fish,
unless our water-mother with dank locks
is sliding under this page below your pen,
only a simple people think they happen.
Dryads and hamadryads were engrained
in the wood's bark, in papyrus, and this paper;
but when our dry leaves crackle to the deer-
footed, hobbling hunter, Papa Bois,
he's just Pan's clone, one more translated satyr.
The crone who steps from her jute sugar sack
(though you line moonlit lintels with white flour),
the beau l'homme creeping towards you, front to back,
the ferny footed, faceless, mouse-eared elves,
these fables of the backward and the poor
marbled by moonlight, will grow white and richer.
Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.

- White Magic, for Leo St. Helene, pg. 38-39

* * *

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea’s
weeping, for the fishermen’s dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they’re tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on a mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year’s massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.

- Elsewhere, for Stephen Spender, pg. 66-67

* * *

Better a jungle in the head
than rootless concrete.
Better to stand bewildered
by the fireflies' crooked street;

winter lamps do not show
where the sidewalk is lost,
nor can these tongues of snow
speak for the Holy Ghost;

the self-increasing silence
of words dropped from a roof
points along iron railings,
direction, in not proof.

But best is this night surf
with slow scriptures of sand,
that sends, not quite a seraph,
but a late cormorant,

whose fading cry propels
through phosphorescent shoal
what, in my childhood gospels,
used to be called the Soul.

- Pentecost, pg. 90

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read from a couple of different Walcott tomes before - a Selected Poems from 2007 and The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 - and the book-length poem Omeros. The Arkansas Testament, published in 1987 is the first collection I've read as originally issued. Look I've only been reading poetry seriously since my 30s, and I have to buy books as and when they fall into bookstores at prices I can afford, and no one supplies with me syllabi and libraries.

Anyway, personal truculence re: autodidact status aside, reading this collection was both rewarding and at times onerous.

It's divided into two parts. 'Here' reckons with Walcott's homeland in the Caribbean islands, often from the perspective of someone who has become a mere visitor to his own land. The descriptions are vivid, and at the same time metaphor is baked into them, and verse is stamped onto the surroundings, with stanzas in waves, lines in railway tracks and so on. He grapples with the postcolonial issues of torn identities, of using a lingua franca that has chased away one's own language, and sometimes he just celebrates where he's from. Walcott saw himself at the beginning of a Caribbean writing tradition, and I think that, while our perspective has moved beyond the early articulations of postcolonial dilemmas, what he has to say still holds good. And his poems are never just a statement of just one thing.

The second section, 'Elsewhere' which comes from the successful, mid-career Walcott's more global context sometimes looses me. Walcott himself states that a poet should generally confine themselves to evoking places within a 20 mile radius of their birthplace, and reading him evoke Wales, or other places, sometimes feels unnecessary. Travelogues are not a genre I especially love, so YMMV. There is a wonderful tribute to Auden, but when he also pays homage to Spender and Tsvetaeva I feel like one most impose a rule on poets: only one dedication or tribute to another poet per collection.

Then he lets loose with the title poem, a long meditation on being a black man from elsewhere travelling in the American south, thinking about its racial legacies, and how he is so reduced to the colour of his skin here, and much else, and I see the value of dumping a good poet in a strange setting and letting him attend to it with his particular gifts of sight and thought. All is forgiven, even the fact that he simply doesn't write about women, Tsvetaeva aside, as if they are people.

[Francisco Barrios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cada fin de semana, durante el último mes, he leído y releído El testamento de Arkansas.

Puedo decir que este ea uno de los mejores poemarios que he leído. Poemas como “La luz del mundo”, “Oración de alabanza a W. H. Auden”, “Mañana, mañana”, “El faro” y “Farolas de invierno” se cuentan no solo entre lo mejor que escribió Walcott, sino entre la mejor poesía escrita en el s. XX.

Este libro que juega con las distancias y las perspectivas (está dividido en dos partes: “Aquí” y “En otra parte”) puede pasar de los poemas de amor y desamor —cercanos a la tradición clásica— a la introspección racial más profunda sobre lo que significa ser una persona de color en el sur de los EE. UU., siempre con un lirismo delicado, pero desbordante, imágenes cargadas de belleza y símiles en los que Walcott hermanó la sensibilidad con la inteligencia:

“Hablaba en serio, yaciendo bajo las frescas sábanas, pero no era más que el derecho de/ cualquier ruina a reventar de flores durante un instante,/ flores extrañas, vigorosas enredaderas.” [p. 112]

Tal vez lo único que me desanima de esta edición es la traducción: demasiado apegada a la literalidad desde lo castizo, sacrifica la musicalidad del autor hasta llegar a la cacofonía:

“[E]n la pegatina fosforescente para parachoques que vende un coche que pasa.” [p. 122]

Fuera de esto, El testamento de Arkansas es un libro que hay que tener a la mano para releerlo. Un texto verdaderamente fundamental.

[Thurston Hunger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had heard a recording Walcott reading a section of "Omeros" 20 years ago and it had stuck with me. Reading this is different, but the sound of his voice is still strong. Even coming out of my own mouth, bitter and currently blistered mouth. I found I really enjoy reading these poems aloud, even with no one around, and I'd recommend that for you.

If I were to include one selection here, maybe "Tomorrow, Tomorrow" but interestingly, I found this online for that poem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_LDW...

Forcing you to pause when the animator wishes, and the soundtrack ominous and heavy to punctuate the arrival of the hearse/taxi...this is a different experience, but still connected to the seed of thought from Walcott.

[Jachin Heckman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But my memory is small
as the sea's thin sound,
what I vaguely recall
is a line of white sand"

A lot of this washed over me. It is chock full of illusions to philosophers I don't know and places I've never been, so I am not sure that I even understood most of it, but... the prose are undeniably rhythmatic and beautifully paired together. Yet another example of why you should always read poetry aloud.

[Arnoldo Rosas · Rating 5 out of 5]

La historia, la gente, el paisaje, la religión, lo cotidiano, la palabra son los elementos con los que Walcott construye sus poemas, este poemario, cargados de sorprendentes imágenes, que nos remueven y deslumbran. El Caribe siempre presente aunque de él no se hable. Marvilloso. Hay que degustarlo. Ir sin apuro por sus páginas.

[Carlos Campos · Rating 4 out of 5]

En "El Testamento de Arkansas" Derek Walcott integra elementos de su tierra natal y del Caribe con representaciones de la poesía contemporánea, dando como resultado una poesía vívida, testimonial, que hacen del poeta ente adánico que recorre el mundo a través de la mirada del asombro.
Un libro fundamental.

[Javier Iglesias · Rating 2 out of 5]

No es mi poeta ni mi poesía. No digo que sea malo, pero tampoco puedo decir que me haya abierto la puerta. Sólo un poema, el que da título al libro, me dejó en última instancia agarrarme a cierta superficie de conexión.

[Leyendoalmundooficial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derek Walcott, poeta caribeño nacido en Santa Lucía descendiente de una familia de esclavos, ganó en 1992 el Nobel de literatura.
Su poesía denota libertad, como uno de sus principales temas. Además toca.temas como la pasión y el amor. Hace honor a otros escritores.

[Patrick Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature and the Arkansas Testament is the reason why - nuff said.

[Eden I. · Rating 4 out of 5]

the John Milton of black people

[Gabriela Soledad Garcés · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maravilloso. Reúne una serie de poemas donde la belleza de las palabras es también una herramienta de denuncia sobre la desigualdad, el racismo y el horror que se vive en la excolonias del caribe.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I could be endlessly fascinated by Walcott's thoughtful take on colonialism, and the deep speech that comes out of the natural landscape of St. Lucia, and the clash of that speech with this Other, but then the countless examples of colonialism in history. Walcott's intelligence is capable of grasping hold of the history of Western Civilization and making it feel far more malleable, and not nearly as menacing as it seems often to be cast. But something in this book feels too predictable. Yes, many of his books have a similar structure, with some poems about St. Lucia, and then other poems set elsewhere. But I guess the distinction feels a bit more subtle in those other books.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title poem is intense. The first poem is my favorite.

[Linda Trott · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a rhythm to Mr. Wolcott's poetry that bespeaks his geography, the music of where he is, the everyday of his surroundings.

[Kaela McNeil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title poem made me cry. I have to read it again and again, always.