The Prodigal: A Poem [Paperback]

Derek Walcott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0374530165 | ISBN-13: 978-0374530167 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Travelogue, elegy, autobiography and lush description mingle and merge in the prolific Nobel laureate's latest book-length poem. Walcott (Omeros; Tiepolo's Hound; etc.) has long specialized in poems about places and journeys, and the first parts of his new work sound like more of the same: flowing pentameters remember stints in Milan, Colombia, the Swiss Alps, Manhattan and Berlin, each associated with a brace of elaborate images, as well as with a particularly attractive young woman. Describing these "women who contained their cities" and the history those cities hold, Walcott traces an "untethered pilgrimage" in which "what was altered was something more profound/ than geography, it was the self." If some readers find the first half of the volume unanchored (or too much like Walcott's 1982 book Midsummer), the second will bring them a deeper and more complex view: we learn that the poet's journey through memory arose in response to the death of his brother, Roddy, and hence "from that fear/ that we he loved and knew once as a boy/ would panic and forget him." In Walcott's return to his native St. Lucia, his poem finds an emotional core; "the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach," allows the poet to conclude with sober reflections on his own celebrity ("the death-mask of Fame") and on advancing age.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The constants in Nobel laureate Walcott's work are the ravishing beauty of his language, his attunement to the sensuous, his feel for the pulse of history in landscape and seascape, and his despair over the contrast between the glory of European art and the prejudice and brutality that stoked the European conquest of the New World, including his Caribbean home, St. Lucia, and engendered the Holocaust. His gifts and preoccupations are brought to bear with particular intensity, intimacy, and resonance in this gorgeously patterned book-length epic in which the narrator casts himself in the role of the prodigal, a man who wanders so far and for so long that he becomes spiritually destitute. Thus Walcott describes a grandly meandering journey, beginning on a train to New York City and continuing on into the Swiss Alps, across Italy, and through Colombia. The melancholy narrator is no longer young, and his faith in literature is unraveling like an old coat, leaving him exposed to chilling truths. It is time, therefore, for the prodigal poet to return home and sing in gratitude of his neglected island. At once autobiographical and archetypal, Walcott's transfixing epic is profoundly affecting. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374530165
• ISBN-13: 978-0374530167
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,190,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Caribbean

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Home, November 19, 2011

By 

J. Ang (Singapore) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prodigal: A Poem (Paperback)

"The Prodigal" is a travelogue with a difference. Written in blank verse (bordering on free verse), Walcott's wanderings are viewed through a very personal lens that reveals less about the places per se, but more about his internal landscape as he moves forwards and backwards to review memories and experiences. In a sense it enriches the sense of place because he invest it with so much meaning and insight.

The poem is structured in 3 parts. From New York to the Swiss Alps to Milan, to Pescara in the first part, he travels to Latin America in the second part, moving ever closer to home, St Lucia in the Caribbean, which he returns to in the third part. Walcott lapses into third person at will, as if indicate the immediacy of moment-by-moment experience - the Walcott who experiences the scenery is not the Walcott who records it down in poetry as the experience is passed even as he writes it down on hindsight.

The trajectory of his journey may be unconscious, but like a true prodigal, the return to homeland is sweetened by his being away:

'This bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot,

this little field of leaves, brittle and fallen,

of all the cities of the world, this is your centre.

Oh to be luminous and exact!' (p.84)

It is interesting to note that while a longing for home draws him ever closer to St Lucia, he nonetheless claims a universal sort of citizenship that is not bound by geography in the following lines:

'...and if they asked

what country I was from I'd say, "The light

of that tree-lined sunrise down the Via Veneto."' (p.29)

Home is also where he is.

7 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A flock of commas, November 3, 2004

By 

Patricia Phillips - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prodigal: A Poem (Hardcover)

In the "Prodigal", the noble poet luareate, Walcott proves again

he is a man of humble proportion with grand perspective. This landscape of memory lives in poignant hues. His flock of commas soar across stanzas of history. In the color nuiance, he bares his painted soul, so we may grow.