The Arkansas Testament - Hardcover

Walcott, Derek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374105820 ISBN 13: 9780374105822

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987

Synopsis

Walcott's eight collection of poems is divided into two parts -- "There," verse evoking the poet's native Carribbean, and "Elsewhere."

About this title

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.

From Library Journal:

Despite its title, this is another evocation of Walcott's St. Lucia, a Caribbean paradise of whelk-gatherers, sea grapes, and sugar cane where the poet reads "silvery nouns" and deciphers "scriptures of sand." Walcott is again the consummate phrasemaker, describing a night "with white rum on its breath" and a moon "with a birthmark like Gorbachev's head." He includes a sequence of poignant love poems and concludes with the title poem, a painful examination of the visiting black poet's role in an Arkansas where he "was still nothing." In language that is unfailingly fresh and inventive, Walcott reminds us in every poem that a largely unexperienced world exists just "outside the door." Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0374105820
• ISBN 13: 9780374105822
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 117