From 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame." The new long poem by Derek Walcott is a troubled meditation on fame and death. Now nearly 75, the St. Lucian who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in literature presents a vivid retrospective on some literal and figurative journeys he has made. Structured in three main parts, in 18 cantos, each comprising three or more sections of flexible blank verse, The Prodigal is the work of a master. The poem characterizes itself as "neither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other -- / the clogged, elegiac thickness of memory. . . ." Wolcott's aim is "to be luminous and exact."We travel restlessly with an alert, self-questioning persona. He is in touch with literature and frequently refers to visual art. His descriptions are often painterly. Whether in the United States, Europe, Mexico, Colombia, Trinidad or St. Lucia; Greenwich Village, Florence, Wilmington, Zermatt, Venice, Milan, Lausanne, Geneva, Rome, Pescara, Genoa, Paris, Barranquilla, Medellin, Cartagena or Guadalajara, he renders vividly each layer of experience: "Yet what was adored/ the city or its women? Aren't they the same?" Women are a blessing and a threat. "As far as secular angels go there is always one,/ in Venice, in Milan, hardening that horn/ of ageing desire and its devastations."The prodigal grows and changes: "We read, we travel, we become." But his privileged existence is shadowed by fear and guilt. He cannot always confidently gauge the nature of his reception by other people, and "subtly the sense insinuates itself/ that frequent exile turns into treachery. . . ." He fears that "what he loved and knew once as a boy/ would panic and forget him. . . ." "He had the smell of cities in his clothes." Having, in youth, vowed not to leave St. Lucia "for real principalities in Berlin or Milan," he sees ironic betrayal in his literary achievement, which "widened reputation and shrank the archipelago/ to stepping stones. . . ." West Indians of Walcott's generation have often argued about Caribbean identity: "we have tortured ourselves/ with our conflicts of origins. . . ." The Caribbean persona is presented as being in awe of First World culture -- "Envy of statues . . . Envy of columns . . . Envy of bells" -- and defensive about St. Lucia: "no echo in the name Gros Islet, / no literature, no history, at least until now." But he rejects the either/or: "no, the point is not comparison or mimicry. . . ." He acknowledges African ancestry and also "an illegitimate ancestor" who is European. "What is culture," asks one voice, "if not the horizontal light/ of magnificent gardens, statues dissolving in dusk/ and fountains whose jets repeat an immortal phrase/ to you, vague pilgrim?" But his celebratory recall of European villages challenges that narrow point of view, and makes us think of similar places elsewhere, including of course St. Lucia: "Do not diminish in my memory/ villages of absolutely no importance,/ the rattling bridge over the stone-bright river,/ un-ornate churches, chapels in the provinces/ of light-exhausted Europe. Hoard, cherish/ your negligible existence, your unrecorded history/ of unambitious syntax, your clean pools/ of unpolluted light over close stones." The question of language is central to discussion of identity. Since the mother tongue of most St. Lucians is a French creole, the use of English may blur details of St. Lucian experience: "A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts./ Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze,/ seen through the gauze of English, a bright scrim,/ a mesh in which light now defines the wires/ and not its natural language? Were your life and work/ simply a good translation?"Translation is a recurrent metaphor. The prodigal is uncertain in Italian: "Ritorno a Milano, if that's correct." He makes a corny mistranslation joke: "e'n la sua volontade è nostra pace,/ in His will is our pizza." One passage suggests that English is "a hieratic language" that the prodigal will never inherit, though it is the one in which he writes, "his whole life a language awaiting translation."After many journeys the prodigal ultimately rediscovers "the enclosing harmony that we call home." Returning, he reasserts his commitment to St. Lucia and its people. "My eyes are washed clean in the sea-wind, I feel/ brightness and sweet alarm, the widened pupils/ of the freshly familiar. . . ."There is plenty of eloquent celebration in The Prodigal. It coexists, however, with a vein of self-recrimination and an unblinking stare at mortality: "Nowhere/ . . . is where we're all headed. . . ." and "do you think Time makes exceptions, do you think/ Death mutters, 'Maybe I'll skip this one'?" "There is an old man standing in the door glass there . . ./ who sometimes feels his flesh cold as the stone/ that he will lie under." There are other valedictory intimations: references to "one last effort," "what will be your last book" and the possibility that what is left behind, a name cut on a wall, will soon "from the grime of indifference" be indecipherable.Some of the most moving passages center on the death, at 71, of Roderick Walcott, Derek's twin brother: "Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head,/ a hummingbird, bewildered by the rafters,/ barred by a pane that shows a lucent heaven." At the end of the poem, the prodigal sees dolphins he associates with Roddy, and drifting cinders that are emblematic "angels"; and the boat is shuddering towards "that other shore." Reviewed by Mervyn Morris Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The constants in Nobel laureate Walcott's work are the ravishing beauty of his language, his attunement to the sensuous, his feel for the pulse of history in landscape and seascape, and his despair over the contrast between the glory of European art and the prejudice and brutality that stoked the European conquest of the New World, including his Caribbean home, St. Lucia, and engendered the Holocaust. His gifts and preoccupations are brought to bear with particular intensity, intimacy, and resonance in this gorgeously patterned book-length epic in which the narrator casts himself in the role of the prodigal, a man who wanders so far and for so long that he becomes spiritually destitute. Thus Walcott describes a grandly meandering journey, beginning on a train to New York City and continuing on into the Swiss Alps, across Italy, and through Colombia. The melancholy narrator is no longer young, and his faith in literature is unraveling like an old coat, leaving him exposed to chilling truths. It is time, therefore, for the prodigal poet to return home and sing in gratitude of his neglected island. At once autobiographical and archetypal, Walcott's transfixing epic is profoundly affecting. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Derek Walcott's virtues as a poet are extraordinary . . . He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts." --James Dickey, The New York Times Book Review


Book 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.


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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Prodigal is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, from Pescara to Milan, from Germany to Cartagena. But always in "the music of memory, water" abide 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, a place 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 the betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which he must return for the sustenance of life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Mervyn Morris - The Washington Post

Some of the most moving passages center on the death, at 71, of Roderick Walcott, Derek's twin brother: "Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head,/ a hummingbird, bewildered by the rafters,/ barred by a pane that shows a lucent heaven." At the end of the poem, the prodigal sees dolphins he associates with Roddy, and drifting cinders that are emblematic "angels"; and the boat is shuddering towards "that other shore."

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. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Is it any wonder that a poet born on an island (St. Lucia) uses voyaging forth as his greatest theme? As in his grand Omeros, the Nobel prize-winning Walcott delivers a travelog both physical and metaphysical: the narrator journeys from New York ("There is a continent outside my window,/ in the Hudson's patient narrative") to the Alps (where he sees "the white spur of the Matterhorn") to his beloved Italy ("Blessed are the small farms conjugating Horace,/ and the olive trees as twisted as Ovid's syntax"). As he travels through landscapes, he also travels through cultural history, absorbing its glories even as he is being remade by it; "it is only afterwards that these things are ours," he observes, then concedes, "I have been blent in the surface of frescoes." In the end, there's a desire to return home that's almost wistful-a dark-hued gentleness that's something new. Brimming with emotion yet as polished as poetry gets; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/04; see also "Fall Editor's Picks, LJ 9/1/04.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

AUTHOR DESCRIPTION