SOURCE: Sanger, Richard. “The Apples of This Second Eden.” Times Literary Supplement (19 September 1997): 10–11.

In the following review, Sanger offers a generally favorable assessment of The Bounty, though notes flaws in what he sees as Walcott's empty phrasing and forced rhyme schemes.

Derek Walcott ended one of his earliest poems, “As John to Patmos,” with a vow:

As John to Patmos, in each love-leaping air O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead. 

Almost half a century later, that vow dominates his new book. His first collection of poems since the epic Omeros (1990), The Bounty praises the natural abundance of the poet's native St Lucia, the goodness—la bonté—of life on earth, and the lives of some who have left it. But Walcott gives his title less exalted meanings as well...