The Haitian Trilogy Plays: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth

Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time In the history plays that compriseThe Haitian Trilogy--Henri Christophe, Drums and ColoursandThe Haytian Earth--Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion. InHenri ChristopheandThe Haytian Earth,Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries--led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe--whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption.Drums and Colours,commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era. FromHenri Christophe'shigh style to the bracing vernacular ofThe Haytian Earth,to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice. Derek Walcottwas born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. HisCollected Poems: 1948-1984was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem,Omeros(1990); a collection of verse,The Bounty(1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poemTiepolo's Hound(2000). His most recent collections of plays areThe Haitian Trilogy(2001) andWalker and The Ghost Dance(2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He has also been given the 2004 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In the history plays that compriseThe Haitian TrilogyHenri Christophe, Drums and Colours,andThe Haitian EarthDerek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion. InHenri ChristopheandThe Haitian Earth,Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionariesled by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophewhose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption.Drums and Colours,commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era. FromHenri Christophe'shigh style to the bracing vernacular ofThe Haitian Earth,to the epic scale and scope ofDrums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice. "The Nobel poet laureate attempts to recreate West Indian history on a canvas as large and mythic as Shakespeare's War of the Roses. It's a heroic, monumental undertakingand not surprisingly, St. Lucia-born Walcott summons the ghost of Shakespeare in his epigraphs, echoes and metaphors. Walcott's lines weave in and out of blank verse as easily as an old man walks in and out of memory."Cynthia Haven,San Francisco Chronicle "The Nobel poet laureate attempts to recreate West Indian history on a canvas as large and mythic as Shakespeare's War of the Roses. It's a heroic, monumental undertaking

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1986; his subsequent works include the book-length poem Omeros (1990), The Bounty (1997) and Tiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with the poet's own paintings, all FSG books. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.