Derek Walcott has both a seafarer's resourcefulness, appropriate to a West Indian, and a moralist's eye for character and commitment. In this powerful new book [The Star-Apple Kingdom] he mediates again the "ancient war between obsession and responsibility" or reflects on the current of history as it afflicts the forfeited beauty of his troubled Antillean world. "The sea is History," he says in one poem, and presents a panoply of Genesis and Exodus and Babylonian Captivity through images of the ocean continually "turning blank pages / looking for History."

And in The Star-Apple Kingdom that search for history remains a constant theme….

Dislocation, both emotional and historical, is of course a natural part of the Walcott strategy. And no more so than in one of the new book's most successful pieces, the long opening poem, "The Schooner Flight," a threnody of conflict and survival during a bedeviled Caribbean voyage...