Product Description

A collection of verse, including a long sequence in memory of the poet's mother and a series dedicated to the poet Joseph Brodsky. Although many of the poems chronicle Walcott's visits to Europe, his native island of St Lucia is of central importance to the collection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #693769 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 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.