BOOKS IN BRIEF Th e St a r -Appl e Kin g d o m, by Derek Walcott (Farrar 58 pp., $10). Since the death of Robert Lowell, there has been no poet writing in English who combines vernacular and the grand manner so successfully as Derek Walcott. (In fact, Lowell, in his last decade or two, had lost the feeling for this delicate balance, so the Trinidadian poet-playwright has pretty much had the field to himself for quite some time.) What Shakespeare did without any strain, modern poets like Lowell, Walcott, and Neruda do with heroic effort, and the resulting styles are not always as easy to follow as these poets with a passion to communicate must have hoped. In the first and longest of the poems in this book, for example, Walcott uses a device that doesn’t work—speaking through the tongue of a protagonist whose bad grammar (in dialect) is a jarring counterpoint to his high-flown rhetoric. Can the speaker who says, “/ stood like a stone and nothing else move/ but the cold sea rippling like galvanize/ and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,/till a wind start to interfere with the trees./I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard” etc., etc.—can he say, in the next breath, “I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,// who have no weapon but poetry and/the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!”? Perhaps. But in the rest of the poems there is no such tonal switching, no gap between brutal content and stylistic sublimity, as Walcott unfurls his anti-colonialist flag:
One morning the Caribbean was cut up by seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts— one thousand miles of aquamarine with
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