Derek Walcott has both a seafarer's resourcefulness, appropriate to a West Indian, and a moralist's eye for character and commitment. In this powerful new book [The Star-Apple Kingdom] he mediates again the "ancient war between obsession and responsibility" or reflects on the current of history as it afflicts the forfeited beauty of his troubled Antillean world. "The sea is History," he says in one poem, and presents a panoply of Genesis and Exodus and Babylonian Captivity through images of the ocean continually "turning blank pages / looking for History."

And in The Star-Apple Kingdom that search for history remains a constant theme….

Dislocation, both emotional and historical, is of course a natural part of the Walcott strategy. And no more so than in one of the new book's most successful pieces, the long opening poem, "The Schooner Flight," a threnody of conflict and survival during a bedeviled Caribbean voyage, set in the idiom of a knockabout Trinidadian sailor…. A dramatic monologue in bold iambs, it is unique, I think, to contemporary verse, reminiscent of some of the tales of Conrad, Youth and Typhoon, in particular, and of Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga—and here and there on a par with them. The sailor's voice, despite occasional awkwardness in colloquial expression, is nevertheless strikingly modulated, alternately roughened and grand, unassuming in its ironies, its appraisal of "the white man" and "the nigger":

The first chain my hands and apologize, "History"; the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride….

Conrad is the memorialist of the colonial experience, sees in its triumph its own defeat; this gives his work its magnificent "sense of finality."…

Walcott's position as a "Third World" poet, an exemplar of the neocolonial experience, is culturally more difficult—hence more ambiguous. He learned the drama of his situation early enough, defining himself as both the artist educated in the "English tongue I love,"… and as the native who is mute, whose tale he will tell. But most of In a Green Night: Poems 1948–60 seemed potent largely as travelogue, even the vatic or visionary strains in bondage to the guile of local color. It was only much later, when he was perhaps following the example of Lowell, opening himself to existential or confessional motifs, the quarrels of public and private life, the burning of the city of Castries or the Biafran invasion, that his negotiations with reality began—first with The Gulf in 1970, then continuing through the autobiographical Another Life of 1973 and Sea Grapes of 1976. In these works, Walcott's own frustrated sense of tribal culture, the lure of the primitive, his debates with Sartrean concepts of "bourgeois culture" or "revolutionary culture," created poems of great individual merit—"Frederiksted Nights," "Sainte Lucie," "Negatives." Yet others were somehow beset with a fugitive or assaultive air.

What's notable, though, about much of The Star-Apple Kingdom is its ecumenical balance. Speech is still touchstone, but no longer so declamatory, no longer seduced by the epical. The old nagging, inventive anger has become the simpler, blunter "anger of love."…

Walcott has found an almost spontaneous way of speaking about History or "the pain of history words contain," as if it were the hero or anti-hero of his world. Often he seems less a witness to the times, a chronicler of upheavals and renewals, than to the landscapes and seascapes themselves over which emerge the faces of generations, or reveries of childhood in his "star-apple kingdom" that is now "a tree of grenades," or the travail of the sea that can bring its own sort of balm….

Of course throughout his career Walcott's leitmotif has always been the natural embrace of adversity—that, and a certain nobility of spirit or elevation of tone. It is not for nothing that the flights of birds—the pelicans and men-o'war and buzzards—form a familiar presence in his panoramas. I did not much care for his early work. Then the "nobility" seemed too ceremonious or portentous, ultimately an affectation. But happily Walcott is no longer a grand seigneur of the tropics. Most of the poems are buoyant with fact, grim with experience; yet also salutary, I think even celebratory in the older Walcott's sardonic way. He is a poet who is now in his late forties, and even in what he elsewhere calls "the bleak modesty of middle age" there is every reason to believe he is at the threshold of his best work.