The Star-Apple Kingdom

Poetry by award winning poet Derek Walcott, native of St. Lucia, and long-time resident of Trinidad. First American edition, first printing, hardcover: prior to assignment of an ISBN. DJ cover illustration/collage by Romare Bearden. Most of the poems in this new collection (1979) follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with "The Schooner Flight," in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad, sailing northward to meet his fate, and ending with "The Star-Apple Kingdom," a long poem whose axis is the crucial attempt to establish a new social order in Jamaica without sacrificing democracy.