The Prodigal: A Poem

By Derek Walcott

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374237433
• ISBN13: 9780374237431
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A flock of commas

In the "Prodigal", the noble poet luareate, Walcott proves again he is a man of humble proportion with grand perspective. This landscape of memory lives in poignant hues. His flock of commas soar across stanzas of history. In the color nuiance, he bares his painted soul, so we may grow.