Derek Walcott – författare

Two masterful artists—Gauguin and van Gogh—come alive in a vibrant drama about 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 café 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 historical 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 Café, 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.

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."

Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott.With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros 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.“One of the great poems of our time.” —John Lucas, New Statesman

The grand epic poem from the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. Omeros, named for Homer-that other chronicler of conflict and homecoming-is the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's epic poem of the Atlantic. In scenes from St. Lucia, England, Massachusetts, and Lakota territory, Walcott offers history on a grand scale-replete with the horrors of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade-as well as the interior story of private suffering and individual exile. In musical and agile lines, as unpredictable and unceasing as the sea itself, Walcott forges an Odyssey for the Americas and an enduring story of Caribbean selfhood, a work that is alive to the present and enriched by the deep, seductive rhythms of the past."One of the great poems of our time." -John Lucas, New Statesman