Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-322) and index.

Biographical sketch -- "Fishing the twilight for alternate voices" : the early poems and Henri Christophe -- The young playwright in Jamaica -- Adam's amnesia : the uses of memory and forgetting -- Dead ends and green beginnings : Dream on monkey mountain -- Another life : West Indian experience and the problems of narration -- "Pulling in the seine / of the dark sea" : "The schooner flight" -- Derek sans terre : the poetry of the 1980s -- Epic amnesia : healing and memory in Omeros -- Post-Homeric Derek : The bounty and Tiepolo's hound.

Nobody's Nation offers an illuminating look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. Paul Breslin argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to Breslin, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walco.

Description based on print version record.