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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. By PAUL BRESLIN. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2001. ix+333 pp. $50 (pbk $20). ISBN 0-226-07426-9 (pbk 0-226-07427-7).
Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. By PAULA BURNETT. Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Tampa: University of Florida. 2001. xiii+380 pp. $55. ISBN 0-8130-1882-x.
Both these excellent studies offer general introductions and close readings of Derek Walcott's poetry, as career and vocation. The quality of balanced appraisal and insightful illumination in both books is exemplary. Their emphases are different and complementary.
Breslin takes Walcott's magnificent poem 'The Schooner Flight' as his starting point, with its narrator, Shabine, steering and drifting through a wide personal and political spectrum: 'either I'm nobody,' Shabine says, 'or I'm a nation.' That bold declaration seems to imply affirmation of a plurality of voices over the neglect or dismissal or suppression of native identity; and yet, Breslin says, 'the works in which the conflict between the desire to remember and the desire to forget, the desire to retrieve history and the desire to annihilate it, is sharpest, most tangled and unresolved, are by and large the most powerful in Walcott's large oeuvre' (p. 6). Beginning with a biographical sketch, Breslin's book...
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