Volume 26, Number 9 · May 31, 1979
Embracing Adversity
By Robert Mazzocco
The Star-Apple Kingdom
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 58 pp., $10.00
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 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.'
Review, 1832 words
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