Derek Walcott's superb new collection ["The Star-Apple Kingdom"] is described by its publishers as an "odyssey," and justly. The book opens with a long narrative about a poor mulatto sailor in flight northward from Trinidad, closes with the title poem, which dramatizes revolutionary movements of mind and feeling in Jamaica, and includes several shorter pieces set in island villages in St. Croix and elsewhere. The only items remote from the Caribbean circuit are a salute to Joseph Brodsky and a memorial to Robert Lowell.

The chief preoccupation, though, isn't peregrination, but power—or rather power and its undoings, actual and imagined, temporary and permanent. And contemporary political realities—the developed nations versus the third world—are frequently in sight….

The exploitative masters who populate these poems are a various lot—slave-ship captains and kingpin admirals, as well as capitalist tycoons and representatives of the classic 19th-century imperialist cultures...