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This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "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 . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer, walking from village to village, tending to the sick, waiting for a sign from God. In this dream, his one companion, Moustique, wants to exploit his power. Moustique decides to impersonate a prophet himself, ignoring a coffin-maker who warns him he will die and enraging the people of the island. Hobain, half-awake in his desolate jail cell, terrorized by the specter of his friend's corruption, clings to his visionary quest. He will try to transform himself; to heal Moustique, his jailer, and his jail-mates; and to be a leader for his people. Dream on Monkey Mountain was awarded the 1971 Obie Award for a Distinguished Foreign Play when it was first presented in New York, and Edith Oliver, writing in The New Yorker, called it "a masterpiece."Three of Derek's Walcott's most popular short plays are also included in this volume: Ti-Jean and His Brothers; Malcochon, or The Six in the Rain; and The Sea at Dauphin. In an expansive introductory essay, "What the Twilight Says," the playwright explains his founding of the seminal dramatic company where these works were first performed, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.First published in 1970, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays is an essential part of Walcott's vast and important body of work.

From the Nobel laureate, a "resplently luminous" (Paul Gray, Time) book-length poem on two educations in painting, a century apart.Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,paused on a step of this couplet, I have never foundits image again, a hound in astounding light.Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris. The poet himself hunts for a detail -- "a slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" -- of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind's eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-six of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott's new play, commissioned by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros. Episodes of the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, The Odyssey confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.

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.