Derek Walcott has been alternating for some years between his native West Indies and America. Meanwhile he has produced a steady flow of fine discursive poems—Sea-Grapes and The Star-Apple Kingdom—set in the Caribbean and full of a growing sense of Walcott's search for a new identity. In [The Fortunate Traveller] he seems to have found it…. But, as the title suggests, his new-found freedom is double-edged. He can look back and 'think of Europe as a gutter of autumn leaves / choked like the thoughts in an old woman's throat' but he also feels 'like lice, like lice, the hungry of this earth / swarm to the tree of life.' His increasing identification with 'suffering humanity' reminds me of some of James K. Baxter's later poetry, in feeling and conviction as well as in a certain Lowellish rhetoric. Walcott's poetry, always rich and full of feeling for...