Monkey Mountain

The Monkey Mountain story started in a Canadian community health centre. Over the past ten years, it has been successfully introduced to groups attending community health and recreational centres and in retirement and nursing homes, in diabetes and mental health programs. Presentations at community college activation programs and at the Toronto Island Sunshine Center have resulted in Monkey Mountain being taken to many settings. Tai Chi has real benefits for all ages. But especially as we get older, we can lose the ability or confidence to walk and move about easily. That loss can be the result of physical changes or simply because of life factors such as our constant use of chairs. Consider falls alone. A serious fall in later years is often the event that may begin the loss of independence. People who do Tai Chi and who do the Monkey Mountain story really do improve their balance and flexibility. They avoid or recover from near falls. They gain or regain their ability to walk or to enjoy exercise. Being able to move about with confidence encourages socialization and adds to the enjoyment of living. There is also a calming logic to the moves of Tai Chi and the Monkey Mountain story. The concentration required to learn and play the moves clears the mind and relieves stress. Tai Chi is sometimes called a moving meditation.

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.

There isn't really a word to describe the noise a volcano makes when it erupts. You don't just hear it, you feel it. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! A class trip to Borneo starts off with a bang – a visit to a real-life volcano! But when Mount Bako erupts, Sam Fox is left stranded with his teacher, Mr Griffin, who's suffering from a heart attack. They make it down the mountain to the cool blue sea – only to be hemmed in by blood-thirsty sharks . . . An action-packed adventure, Monkey Mountain is the hottest Extreme Adventure yet! Visit puffin.com.au/extreme for more.

Explores diverse cultural identities, both theoretically and through concrete, specific interpretations of selected major texts from former British colonies.

The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.

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. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle. Linking extensive archival research and new interviews with Walcott himself to detailed critical readings of major works, Nobody's Nation will take its place as the definitive study of the poet.

John Thieme here provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginnings in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts--Caribbean, European and other--that have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for students and readers coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time.