Derek Walcott's superb new collection ["The Star-Apple Kingdom"] is described by its publishers as an "odyssey," and justly. The book opens with a long narrative about a poor mulatto sailor in flight northward from Trinidad, closes with the title poem, which dramatizes revolutionary movements of mind and feeling in Jamaica, and includes several shorter pieces set in island villages in St. Croix and elsewhere. The only items remote from the Caribbean circuit are a salute to Joseph Brodsky and a memorial to Robert Lowell.

The chief preoccupation, though, isn't peregrination, but power—or rather power and its undoings, actual and imagined, temporary and permanent. And contemporary political realities—the developed nations versus the third world—are frequently in sight….

The exploitative masters who populate these poems are a various lot—slave-ship captains and kingpin admirals, as well as capitalist tycoons and representatives of the classic 19th-century imperialist cultures…. And the causes of the masters' undoings are as various as the characters themselves. (p. 11)

[Throughout] "The Star-Apple Kingdom," the impression is of a subject known to its marrow, explored in microcosm and macrocosm, past and present, both for its political bearings and for the light it casts on the moral development of our kind….

It is scripture nowadays that political poetry is almost invariably smutched by highmindedness, phony commitment and detachable sentiment. But "The Star-Apple Kingdom" seems to me utterly free of such pollutions. In skies this high, with contexts of thought and feeling this rich, self-righteousness is a flea—it wouldn't be noticed if it were there. Nor does the poet's embattlement ever come across as a matter of contentious opinion; it is first of all a charge on the language, a stirring muscularity in the verse. Walcott's struggle with the dominating mad masters who pack it in in these poems packs his line with fury. A ceaseless energy conversion is in process, seemingly—larger-than-life physical force becoming verbal force and producing in the end verse which, while densely particularized and personally accented, is also spacious as a tide, irresistible, Elizabethan.

And, far more important than any of this, the poet's conception of himself as spokesman is accompanied by an ability to imagine believably comprehensive voices, tuned to bottom dog and visionary alike….

"The Star-Apple Kingdom" marks … the return, after an absence, of a moving public speech to poetry in English. And that places it with the headiest and rarest kinds of poetic experience—fruitful to people who practice the art and to all the rest of us, too. (p. 30)