Volume 16, Number 8 · May 6, 1971
Waiting for the End
By Denis Donoghue
The Gulf
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 111 pp., $5.50
The Carrier of Ladders
by W.S. Merwin
Atheneum, 138 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Darker
by Mark Strand
Atheneum, 47 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace
by James Merrill
Atheneum, 83 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Whispering Roots and Other Poems
by C. Day-Lewis
Harper & Row, 90 pp., $5.00
Collecting Evidence
by Hugh Seidman
Yale, 78 pp., $1.75 (paper)
Baby Breakdown
by Anne Waldman
Bobbs-Merrill, 115 pp., $5.00
Derek Walcott is a poet, a playwright, a West Indian, sometime director of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. For all I know, he may have other distinguishing marks, but these few are enough to give him a plot, a predicament. It is clear from the Overture to Dream on Monkey Mountain,[*] a collection of his plays, that he carries on his back a load of unfulfilled history, promises, promises. He has done well by his own promise, he has been as good as his word, but one man can't do everything. When Mr. Walcott writes of Caribbean theater and its bearing upon the nature of Caribbean life, his prose reminds me of those early propaganda essays in which Yeats tried to call a theater into existence by will power and rhetoric. Often, what ought to be done requires magic, divine intervention. In the end, a writer settles for the inadequate resources of talent, time, energy, and a little patronage.
Review, 4112 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |