Since 1959, Derek Walcott has directed and written for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The Joker of Seville, a comedy based on Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla, was commissioned by England's Royal Shakespeare Company. Walcott's sensitivity to the pacing, meter, and lyricism of the original makes his first attempt at adaptation an extraordinary accomplishment. O Babylon! brings life ro the Rastafarian sect in Jamaica, which grew during Marcus Garvey's exile to that country and has recently been popularized through the lyrics of reggae music.

Since 1959, Derek Walcott has directed and written for the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The Joker of Seville, a comedy based on Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla, was commissioned by England's Royal Shakespeare Company. Walcott's sensitivity to the pacing, meter, and lyricism of the original makes his first attempt at adaptation an extraordinary accomplishment. O Babylon! brings life the Rastafarian sect in Jamaica, which grew during Marcus Garvey's exile to that country and has recently been popularized through the lyrics of reggae music. Mr. Walcott's plays have been produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Negro Ensemble Company. Dream on Monkey Mountain, the title play of his earlier collection, won the Obie Award for a Distringuished Foreign Play when produced in New York in 1971. It was deemed "a masterpiece" by Edith Oliver in The New Yorker. "Dream on Monkey Mountain," she wrote, "is a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, and poetry is rare in the modern theatre. Every line of it plays....there is a sound psychological basis for every action and emotion."

Comprehensive alphabetical guide to theatre in Africa and the Caribbean: national essays and entries on countries and performers.

Coming some five years after the death of poet, playwright, teacher and painter Derek Walcott, this book brings together essays, memoirs, and creative work addressing many aspects of his life and work. 20 years after Walcott became the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, this volume gathers renowned and emerging poets, friends, theatre critics and artists to lay bare their own relationship with a larger-than-life figure and cast their ‘various light’ on his by-no-means unproblematic legacy.

The Caribbean is an exotic but not too distant land, full of rich cultural traditions. The literature of the Caribbean reflects the social, political, and cultural concerns of the region and is a valuable tool for learning about the area and its people. This book includes chapters on roughly a dozen contemporary Caribbean writers. Along with plot summaries, these sections discuss major themes and give close attention to how Caribbean culture figures in the writer's texts. To help students conduct further research, each chapter cites works for further reading.

This comparative study investigates the epic lineage that can be traced back from Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Ezra Pound’s Cantos through Dante’s Divina Commedia to the epic poems of Virgil and Homer, and identifies and discusses in detail a number of recurrent key topoi. A fresh definition of the concept of genre is worked out and presented, based on readings of Homer. The study reads Pound’s and Walcott’s poetics in the light of Roman Jakobson’s notions of metonymy and metaphor, placing their long poems at the respective opposite ends of these language poles. The notion of ‘epic ambition’ refers to the poetic prestige attached to the epic genre, whereas the (non-Bloomian) ‘anxiety’ occurs when the poet faces not only the risk that his project might fail, but especially the moral implications of that ambition and the fear that it might prove presumptuous. The drafts of Walcott’s Omeros are here examined for the first time, and attention is also devoted to Pound’s creative procedures as illustrated by the drafts of the Cantos. Although there has already been an intermittent critical focus on the ‘classical’ (and ‘Dantean’) antecedents of Walcott’s poetry, the present study is the first to bring together the whole range of epic intertextualities underlying Omeros, and the first to read this Caribbean masterpiece in the context of Pound’s achievement.

A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career—the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world—with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century—a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and—perhaps most surprisingly—getting older.