SOURCE: King, Bruce. Review of The Bounty, by Derek Walcott. World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (winter 1998): 191–92.

In the following positive review, King praises Walcott's imagery and verse in The Bounty.

In recent volumes of Derek Walcott's poetry “light” is an encompassing term for the light of the creation, the light that illuminates the world, the light that illuminates art (especially painting), and the inner light of the divine in the artist and all humans. Here the “bounty” includes all gifts from God: daybreak, each day, light, the natural world and its creatures, the beauty of St. Lucia and Trinidad, being a writer, the gift of poetry, even Walcott's having been taught by his mother to respect the bounty and being taught to work to use it. The bounty is the gift of life in its varied aspects, including the ship The Bounty which brought the breadfruit from the Pacific...