The Prodigal: A Poem (First Edition)

Derek Walcott

ISBN 10: 0374237433 / ISBN 13: 9780374237431

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004

About this Item

First printing, with full number line. A very fine (as-new) copy in a very fine (as-new) jacket. A clean, tight copy with price ($20.00) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. REVIEW copy with publicity material laid in. Although not marked as such in any way, this book came from the library of poet and literary critic J.D. McClatchy, from his estate in Stonington, Connecticut.

Seller Inventory # McClatchy-202

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Prodigal: A Poem (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374237433
• ISBN 13: 9780374237431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Do not diminish in my memory
villages of absolutely no importance,
... Hoard, cherish
your negligible existence, your unrecorded history
of unambitious syntax, your clean pools
of unpolluted light over close stones.

The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, Pescara to Milan, Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water," abides St. Lucia, the author's birthplace, and the living sea. In his new work, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, where the New World is an idea, a "wavering map," and where History subsumes the natural history of his "unimportantly beautiful" island home. Here, the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which, like Antaeus, he must return for the very sustenance of life.

About the Author

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include Omeros (1990), The Bounty (1997), and Tiepolo's Hound (2000). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.