Derek Walcott's book The Bounty opens with the title poem, a memorable elegy to his 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.
"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 dr
Seamus Heaney
"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
