[If] his orientation had been solely French, Mr. Césaire would not have been able to return from "exile" in France and find his originality as a poet. What a reader discovers in his early epic poem, "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" [in "Aime Cesaire: The Collected Poetry"], is a concerted effort to affirm his stature in French letters by a sort of poetic one-upmanship but also a determination to create a new language capable of expressing his African heritage—a "'Black' French which even while being French would carry the 'Negro' mark," as he once defined it to the Haitian poet René Depestre. The poem's dazzling syntactical and lexical inventiveness combines elements of African and Haitian history (in 1804 Haiti became the first black republic) with reflections on contemporary racism in Paris and a vast display of botanical, zoological, medical and classical erudition, not to mention African and Creole terminology. Of course, the influence of European poets and thinkers is also there, but the rhythmic insistence of the lines reminds the reader of an African oral tradition, one that can easily be set to music. For these reasons, the poem has reached an audience far beyond France….

If none of his other collections of poems (including the most recently published, "Moi, Laminaire …," which is not in this edition) have been able to duplicate the erudition, ideological commitment and linguistic playfulness of "Notebook," each has reaffirmed Mr. Césaire's reputation as a poet. He is able to deal with classic Surrealist strategies involving a whole range of unexpected associations—at times the consequence of automatic writing, as in "Miraculous Weapons" (1946) and "Solar Throat Slashed" (1948)—as well as with political ideas and purely lyrical turns, as in "Ferraments" (1960) and "Noria" (1976). When the poet calls himself a barbarian, the reader should be reminded of the connotation "primitive" but also of the condition of the black in a white world….

With the publication of this collection of Mr. Césaire's poetry, his influence will no longer be limited to negritude. He has found his rightful place among the major French poets of this century.