The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora. Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams. Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world. Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country’s first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.

The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora. Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams. Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world. Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country’s first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.

"Dream on Monkey Mountain 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."--Edith Oliver, The New Yorker

This new Selected Poems offers an ordered retrospective of the fertile career of Derek Walcott, spanning six decades and drawing on twelve collections. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Walcott has, in the words of Seamus Heaney, 'moved with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it'.

Drawing from every stage of the Nobel laureate's career, Derek Walcott's "Selected Poems "brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated "Omeros" and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like 'In My Eighteenth Year', published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like 'A Far Cry from Africa', which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like 'The Schooner Flight' from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender 'Sixty Years After', from the 2010 collection White Egrets.

Across sixty-five years, Walcott has grappled with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement - and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

A magnificent, semi-autobiographical sequence from a Nobel Prize-winning poet, 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 become a painter in Paris - and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover the detail of a painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Published with 25 full-colour 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.

Two masterful artists--Gauguin and van Gogh--come alive in a vibrant exploration of friendship, art, and madness
Two painters--Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh--are living together in the sleepy town of Arles in 1888. Soon, Gauguin, frustrated by van Gogh's refusal to acknowledge his increasingly troubled mind, will depart for Paris. In two years, van Gogh will be dead by his own hand. In the meantime, the friends discuss their craft; they frequent a local cafe that van Gogh will soon immortalize; they become acquainted with a young prostitute, Lotte, who becomes Gauguin's lover; they argue; they paint.
In Derek Walcott's new play, "O Starry Starry Night," two world-renowned artists come to life as they wrestle both with grand themes--friendship, loyalty, fame--and with more mundane concerns, money primary among them. The scenes Walcott sketches summon several of van Gogh's most famous paintings: "Sunflowers," "The Night Cafe," "The Bedroom at Arles." His manipulation of language--van Gogh's eloquent monologues giving way to more abstract speeches--evokes the painter's descent into madness. Over the action hangs the threat of violence, of death, which lends the play a potent urgency; for at least one of the characters, time is quickly running out.
"O Starry Starry Night" is powerfully wrought, and demonstrates once again the sharpness of Walcott's eye: as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, and, above all, as an observer of human follies, foibles, failings, and aspirations.

In this lyrical new work, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott returns to the island of St. Lucia for a lush and vivid tale of spirituality and the supernatural. In "Moon-Child", the crafty Planter (who may or may not be the Devil in disguise) schemes to take over the island for development. Between him and his goal lies the Bouton family, whose ailing matriarch strikes a bargain: if either of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, they will win the right to the rest of their days in wealth and peace. In a fable that spans from St. Lucia's verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colourful creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward postcolonial legacy and complex racial identities, "Moon-Child" marks a remarkable new addition to the canon of one of the world's most prolific Caribbean playwrights.

"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 his new work, 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.

Dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate

On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history.

In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

The fourth book in the Modern Library’s Paris Review Writers at Work series, Latin American Writers at Work is a thundering collection of interviews with some of the most important and acclaimed Latin American writers of our time. These fascinating conversations were compiled from the annals of The Paris Review and include a new, lyrical Introduction by Nobel Prize–winning author Derek Walcott.

Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time

In the history plays that comprise The Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion.

In Henri Christophe and The Haytian Earth, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From Henri Christophe's high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haytian Earth, to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate.

Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form 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 have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

"The Bounty" was the first book of poems Walcott published after winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the poet's mother, the book features a haunting series of poems that evoke Walcott's native ground, the island of St. Lucia. "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves," Walcott's great contemporary Joseph Brodsky once observed. "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott--three Nobel laureates and threeof our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologiesthat surround one of America's most famous and beloved deceased poets--RobertFrost.

The 1992 Quincentennial of the encounter between the New World and the Old resulted in a veritable culture war- an extreme polarization of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows brings a fresh perspective to the confusing question of American identity. It clears the minefields laid by the generals commanding the opposing camps, while demonstrating that both sides have been primarily interested in protecting and defending an idea of "Americanness" that cannot resist scrutiny. Some of the leading international scholars in anthropology, comparative literature, and history of the Americas show convincingly in this book that contacts between and among peoples and ethnic groups have, since early colonial times, produced new- and typically American- cultural forms throughout the hemisphere.

Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows will appeal to the general reader and will attract a wide readership in folklore and cultural anthropology as well as in Caribbean and Latin American studies, comparative literature, and history.

With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott's new play, commissioned by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros.

Episodes of the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, The Odyssey confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.

Walcott's eight collection of poems is divided into two parts -- "There," verse evoking the poet's native Carribbean, and "Elsewhere."

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.

This text is the result of a commission by the RSC. It shares the Homeric/Caribbean background with Walcott's epic poem Omeros which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1990.