The Bounty [Hardcover]

Derek Walcott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1997

The winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature presents a collection of poems--his first since Omeros--that includes an elegy to his mother and a series of meditations on his native island of St. Lucia.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Poet Derek Walcott loves grand themes. In his award-winning epic poem, Omeros, he revisted Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, relocating them to the Caribbean and peopling them with the poor fishermen and colonials of his homeland. In The Bounty, Walcott takes the 1787 arrival of that ill-fated British ship on Caribbean shores as the starting point for an elegiac meditation on life, art, and identity. In the collection's first poem, "The Bounty," Walcott remembers his mother who "lies/near the white beach stones"; the bounty he finds in his homeland, St. Lucia, is more than just the breadfruit brought to the Islands by the H.M.S. Bounty two centuries ago; it is the "thorns of the bougainvillea," and the industry of ants.

The Bounty is both an elegy for the poet's mother and for himself--for the land he left behind and the identity he shed as a result. In these poems, St. Lucia becomes all the more precious because Walcott can't go home again. Rich in imagery, these poems evoke the essence of the islands with each line.

From Library Journal

This volume is Nobel Prize winner Walcott's first since the widely lauded Omeros (Farrar, 1990), and perhaps his best since the outstanding Midsummer (LJ 1/84). Here, in the long title poem, he salutes the memory of his mother, whose "lessons" allowed him "to write of the light's bounty on familiar things." The remainder of the book is given to expertly turned meditations on love, history, memory, and reading. Walcott never succumbs to the poet's fondness for travelog or book report; the unquiet mind that unifies these poems makes them continuous parts of one of the greatest poetic achievements of our century. In an age of demotic and bare poetry, he is insistent upon eloquence and even sublimity; his "great themes of exaltation" find form in Dante's terza rima and brilliantly oblique slant rhyme. Walcott, who divides his time between Trinidad and Boston, has long given passionate expression to "the heart's salt history"?for him, the uneasy reconciliation of the dazzling Caribbean with the cooler comforts of Western culture. Here, with poignant strangeness, he finds his rest beyond even poetry, in "that elate dissolution which goes beyond happiness." Essential.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 77 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374115567
• ISBN-13: 978-0374115562
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,681,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of elegies, full of death, sadness and simple faith., September 26, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Saint Lucia, West Indies (home of Walcott)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bounty (Hardcover)

Walcott's photograph on the back of the 1st edition sums up the feeling of Bounty- Sorrow, the grief of the death of friends and loved ones, faith in God seen "as through a glass darkly", the exhaustion of a sensitive man aware of his own mortality. Yet, through it all is the great sense of gratitude for the folk culture of the country that has nurtured him. And if he will not make great declarations of religious faith, he is thankful for the sun on the leaves, the ocean outside his door, the songs of Sessenne the folk singer of St. Lucia. Like Crusoe and Odysseus, this fortunate traveller has returned to his bench on the edge of the sea under the breadfruit leaves, "where stars and fireflies breed." This poet is past posturing. "The only art left is the preparation of grace", and even now, ever the bright eyed poet (behind the tears of the aging sage), he is "going down to the shallow edge to begin again." Walcott's only vocation has been poetry, his universe that of letters. In this he has never lost his faith.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EACH WORD IS LIKE A VIEW OF CARRIBEAN HEART, April 22, 1998

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[e-mail] (OSCEOLA,ARKANSAS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bounty (Hardcover)

READING THIS IS LIKE PAINTING A PORTRAIT . IT GLIMMER LIKE THE JEWEL OF THE CARRIBEANBLUE TONE IS A DEEP PATHOSOF PERSONAL EMOTION THAT COME ONLY COME FROM THE PEN OF ONE WHO LOVES HIS HOMELAMD AND WRITE ABOUT IT

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Striking imagery, October 23, 1997

By 

robo1235 (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bounty (Hardcover)

Walcott's poetry sweeps you along on a series of vivid and memorable images that leave you breathless.