The effectiveness of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal lies in the poet's extremely rich and often novel vocabulary, his dazzling and occasionally surrealistic imagery, and, most importantly, the maintenance of a seemingly unstructured flow of verse and prose narrative. It is perhaps because of the lack of any divisions in the seventy-page poem … that critical attention has tended to sidestep to some extent considerations of structure in the work…. Césaire has, in fact, imposed a rather clearly-distinguishable structure on this most explosive poem [which] … contributes in a rather dynamic fashion to the work's almost hypnotic power. (p. 165)

[It] appears that there is a pattern of both returns and descents, and that this pattern, based on a dialectic of experience and imagination, produces the impetus for a striking metamorphosis of the narrator from observer to messiah. It is this dynamic structure which provides the vehicle for the...