From the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, a book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart "Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound; my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write, paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found its image again, a hound in astounding light." Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro--a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris--and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover a detail--"a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound"--of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-five full-color reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

This first extended study of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) defines the book as the culmination of the poetry and poetic of the Caribbean writer and Nobel Prize winner. In this long poem, Walcott achieves three goals pursued throughout his career: to develop an original Caribbean aesthetic; to meld the modes of poetry and prose; and to formulate the Bildung of the island-artist in terms of an ‘autobiographical’ narrative. The analysis provides an aesthetic and cultural evaluation of the poem, in terms both of the Western poetic tradition to which it refers through its rich intertextuality and of its significance as a postcolonial milestone. The commentary locates Walcott in an aesthetic tradition running from Emerson through the American Pragmatists to modernist poets; describes his experimental use of certain central narrative strategies in his semi-autobiographical long poems, which is compared to those of another, openly admired, bilingual writer, Vladimir Nabokov; explores Walcott’s revision of the epic mode and of the genre of autobiography; delineates his unfolding of a post-Romantic internalization of the poet’s Arthurian quest; and discusses his complex treatment of the multi-layered metaphor of light as major evidence of the maturity of his style and poetic, with their conscious cross-fertilization between the literary cultures of Europe and the Caribbean. An appendix to this study contains the transcriptions of various ‘Walcott events’ that took place in Italy in the summers of 2000 and 2001, including a creative writing seminar, a press conference, and readings. This extensive material opens a window onto Walcott’s gifts as a teacher, to his stringent yet passionate commitment to the art of poetry, and to the ways in which he and his students grapple with the challenges of literary translation.

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In this book of poems, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.

This first extended study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (2000) defines the book as the culmination of the poetry and poetic of the Caribbean writer and Nobel Prize winner. In this long poem, Walcott achieves three goals pursued throughout his career: to develop an original Caribbean aesthetic; to meld the modes of poetry and prose; and to formulate the Bildung of the island-artist in terms of an 'autobiographical' narrative. The analysis provides an aesthetic and cultural evaluation of the poem, in terms both of the Western poetic tradition to which it refers through its rich intertextuality and of its significance as a postcolonial milestone. The commentary locates Walcott in an aesthetic tradition running from Emerson through the American Pragmatists to modernist poets; describes his experimental use of certain central narrative strategies in his semi-autobiographical long poems, which is compared to those of another, openly admired, bilingual writer, Vladimir Nabokov; explores Walcott's revision of the epic mode and of the genre of autobiography; delineates his unfolding of a post-Romantic internalization of the poet's Arthurian quest; and discusses his complex treatment of the multi-layered metaphor of light as major evidence of the maturity of his style and poetic, with their conscious cross-fertilization between the literary cultures of Europe and the Caribbean. An appendix to this study contains the transcriptions of various 'Walcott events' that took place in Italy in the summers of 2000 and 2001, including a creative writing seminar, a press conference, and readings. This extensive material opens a window onto Walcott's gifts as a teacher, to his stringent yet passionate commitment to the art of poetry, and to the ways in which he and his students grapple with the challenges of literary translation.

A collection spanning the range of the writer's career includes his first published poem, his celebrated verses on violence in Africa, his mature work from "The Star-Apple Kingdom, " and his late masterpieces from "White Egrets."

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says, drawn from pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere. This collection forms a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

Includes most of the poems in each of Walcott's collections as selected by the poet, and the complete text of Another Life.