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    Sea Grapes
    Sea Grapes
    Sea Grapes
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Sea Grapes

    By Derek Walcott

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    About this ebook

    Derek Walcott was aptly described by Laurence Liberman in The Yale Review as "one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day." Sea Grapes deepens with this major poet's search for true images of the post-Adamic "new world"--especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott's rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets--Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda.

    On the publication of Selected Poems in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, "Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries." This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott's mastery. He is also the author of The Gulf, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, and Another Life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880443
    Sea Grapes
    Author

    Derek Walcott

    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.

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      Book preview

      Sea Grapes - Derek Walcott

      Sea Grapes

      THAT SAIL WHICH LEANS ON LIGHT,

      tired of islands,

      a schooner beating up the Caribbean

      for home, could be Odysseus,

      home-bound on the Aegean;

      that father and husband’s

      longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

      like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name

      in every gull’s outcry.

      This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

      between obsession and responsibility

      will never finish and has been the same

      for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

      now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

      since Troy sighed its last flame,

      and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough

      from whose ground-swell the great hexameters come

      to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

      The classics can console. But not enough.

      The Virgins

      Down the dead streets of sun-stoned Frederiksted,

      the first free port to die for tourism,

      strolling at funeral pace, I am reminded

      of life not lost to the American dream;

      but my small-islander’s simplicities

      can’t better our new empire’s civilized

      exchange of cameras, watches, perfumes, brandies

      for the good life, so cheaply underpriced

      that only the crime rate is on the rise

      in streets blighted with sun, stone arches

      and plazas blown dry by the hysteria

      of rumour. A condominium drowns

      in vacancy; its bargains are dusted,

      but only a jewelled housefly drones

      over the bargains. The roulettes spin

      rustily to the wind—the vigorous trade

      that every morning would begin afresh

      by revving up green water round the pierhead

      heading for where the banks of silver thresh.

      Frederiksted Nights

      The goombay band or whatever

      combination of Chicano charge

      and black funk ignites the fish-fries

      by the sizzling pierhead

      with the sharks of submarines cruising

      like the Puerto Riquenan putas

      or lemon Dominican whores,

      the electric guitars

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