Walker and The Ghost Dance: Plays - Softcover

Walcott, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528144 ISBN 13: 9780374528140

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess." --Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374528144
• ISBN 13: 9780374528140
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258