SOURCE: Lucas, John. “In Multitudinous Dialects.” New Statesman & Society 3, no. 86 (2 February 1990): 33–34.

In the following review, Lucas offers a positive assessment of Walcott's Collected Poems, though expresses concerns about the quality of Walcott's later verse.

In “A Letter from Brooklyn,” [from Collected Poems,] a poem written some time after he had left the island of his birth, St Lucia, Derek Walcott tells of an old woman who writes to him about his parents and of how “The strength of one frail hand in a dim room / Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured, / Restores my sacred duty to the Word.” As these lines show, Walcott's word is spoken in accents learned from English masters, and from the beginning he learned his lessons well. In 1948 his home town was destroyed by fire. The 18-year-old poet recorded the event in a sonnet, “City's Death by Fire.” It ends:

In town, leaves were...