SOURCE: Greenwell, Bill. “Buried Treasure.” New Statesman 126, no. 4347 (15 August 1997): 46–47.

In the following review, Greenwell offers a mixed assessment of The Bounty.

Derek Walcott—whose previous book, the epic and brilliant Omeros, neatly preceded his Nobel Prize for Literature—is by no means always accessible. It's not that he's hard to understand, nor that his genius is not everywhere self-evident. It's just that he writes with such colossal dignity and sonority, that his poems can sometimes wrap an anchor and chain around even dedicated readers. You are dropped to the ocean floor of his imagination, there to be hauled along on his pondering (and occasionally ponderous) voyage of discovery.

Part of the problem is his unyielding choice of line length (nearly always loose hexameters) and his admirable, even remarkable rhyme schemes, usually inventive near-rhymes on alternate lines. This dexterity is made to look effortless, but he frequently runs the...