The Bounty

by Derek Walcott

Overview

The Bounty was the first book of poems Derek 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374525378
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/18/1998
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

What People are Saying About This

Joseph Brodsky

The Bounty opens with the title poem, a memorable elegy to Walcott's mother. It also contains a haunting series of poems evoking the poet's native ground, the island of St. Lucia. The power and beauty of Walcott's lyric gift have never been more fully in evidence.

Editorial Reviews

Walcott is a master of . . . easy, careless abundance.” —William Logan, The New York Times Book Review

“A prime aged Porterhouse steak, four times as thick as this slim volume, [could] not match the rich density of this new collection, the Nobel laureate's first since his epic Omeros. Walcott's lines are marbled with imagery worth savoring on the tongue before swallowing: 'burnt sheaves of tall corn / shriven and bearded in chorus.' He forges a connection between the human heart and the earth that is reminiscent of the best Irish poetry.” —Publishers Weekly

“Walcott has moved with gradually deepening confidence to find his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess. It can be incantatory and self-entrancing . . . It can be athletic and demotic . . . It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words.” —Seamus Heaney

“[This is] Walcott's first collection of poems since he won the Nobel in 1992 . . . All the master's gifts are prodigally displayed here: an ear that finds liquid music in 'fast water quarrelling over clear stones,' a wit that sees death—the state of wordlessness—as 'beyond declension,' and an attentiveness that [notes how] squirrels 'spring up like questions'.” —Pico Iyer, Time

From the Publisher

Walcott is a master of...easy, careless abundance. -- New York Times Book Review

William Logan

Derek Walcott is generally called a lyrical poet, and surely he is. His plushly turned evocations of Caribbean flora and fauna make vivid panoramas, or conveniently sized postcards:

The mango trees serenely rust when they are in flower, nobody knows the name for that voluble cedar whose bell-flowers fall, the pomme-arac purples its floor.

Yet this lyric touch too often serves predictable feelings -- his work is elegiac and earnestly political -- that could withstand at least some small lashing of cynical wit. That was the Restoration's poetic marriage -- lovely lyric and bilious barb -- but Nobel Laureate Walcott seems too intent on giving good account of himself and his island home. Like several of its preceding volumes, The Bounty is a decent collection of well-meaning poems that lack both a necessary spark as well as a perverse, yet no less necessary, will to extinguish that spark.

At bottom, amid the rich descriptions and biblical allusions, Walcott's poems high-mindedly aim to give voice to the collective unconscious of the race. "[W]e have no solace but utterance," he decrees in the book's title poem, an elegy for his mother, "hence this wild cry." This familiar, upbeat ideological program is sounded throughout the book, in which the notion that redemption and identity can be found in homeland and articulation goes unquestioned. Such easy epiphanies might pass muster if Walcott were not also so given to clichés: "Remember childhood? Remember a faraway rain? Yesterday I wrote a letter and tore it up." For those who already love Walcott's keen eye and graceful lilt, The Bounty provides the expected.--Salon

Albert Mobilio