THE GULF

Derek Walcott is a West Indian poet, nurtured on the white man's culture, a frequent visitor to these shores, who produces poems of an exotic, self-questioning sort, notable for scenic effects and violently-charged reveries. The characteristic note of attachment and alienation struck in his earlier work (""I who have cursed/ The drunken officer of British rule, how choose/ Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?""), is heard again in his latest collection: ""Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,/ one a hack's hired prose, I earn/ my exile."" Walcott's declamatory use of language extends beyond racial conflict and regional motifs (though with these thematic properties he achieves his most striking moments) and enters the larger, more representative stage of the poet as wracked modern consciousness. Hart Crane provided the original model, that of brooding seer, full of ""sea-music and sea-light,"" surrounded by ""filth and foam,"" while Robert Lowell seems to have influenced his current stance, the poet as victim of experience, who knows ""there'll be no miracle tonight; by the third drink/ you can tell,"" who watches the years accumulate about him: ""Dead and dreaming exchange pities./ Huddled, till dawn in wooden, echoing rooms,/ they share their different and indifferent cities."" Naturally, a good many of these poems depend ultimately on the authenticity of tone and feeling, the passion of despair, the prevailing aura of exile, bitter nostalgia, the chaos of change. Unfortunately, Walcott never quite reaches the dramatic power necessary to sustain these moods, which only poetry of the highest order can do. His is a lyric gift, best in descriptive or conversational guise (see ""The River"" and ""Blues""); elsewhere he's more monotonous than moving.