The Prodigal
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Travelogue, elegy, autobiography and lush description mingle and merge in the prolific Nobel laureate's latest book-length poem. Walcott (Omeros; Tiepolo's Hound; etc.) has long specialized in poems about places and journeys, and the first parts of his new work sound like more of the same: flowing pentameters remember stints in Milan, Colombia, the Swiss Alps, Manhattan and Berlin, each associated with a brace of elaborate images, as well as with a particularly attractive young woman. Describing these "women who contained their cities" and the history those cities hold, Walcott traces an "untethered pilgrimage" in which "what was altered was something more profound/ than geography, it was the self." If some readers find the first half of the volume unanchored (or too much like Walcott's 1982 book Midsummer), the second will bring them a deeper and more complex view: we learn that the poet's journey through memory arose in response to the death of his brother, Roddy, and hence "from that fear/ that we he loved and knew once as a boy/ would panic and forget him." In Walcott's return to his native St. Lucia, his poem finds an emotional core; "the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach," allows the poet to conclude with sober reflections on his own celebrity ("the death-mask of Fame") and on advancing age.
