Derek Walcott is a Negro from the Caribbean, and most of his poems are related to this fact…. Mr. Walcott's Africa obsesses him, and in several fine poems [in "Selected Poems"] it undergoes a powerful and painful transmutation into symbolic ground, the better known for having never been seen. "How can I turn from Africa and live?" the poet asks, but live he does, walking through his Antillean world and speaking with anger and imagination of what he sees.

One is left, finally, with a complex, troubling sense of the Caribbean Islands, their reality and unreality, their "filth and foam," their curious and fateful role as the ex-slave's place of dislocation and now, strangely—and often wonderfully—his spectacular home ground. And Mr. Walcott's book, doubly welcome in a time of timidity and correctness, is very much there as well.

James Dickey, "Different Voices, Different Tones," in The...