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.
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 HMS 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.
