When 'In a Green Night' appeared, Derek Walcott was at once recognized as a poet of importance. Robert Graves wrote that 'Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.' Charles Causly called him 'a new poet of imaginative energy and power', and P.N. Furbank spoke of his 'immense freshness and verve'. In this new book Walcott is again an interpreter between the Old World and the New. Making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery, he is mainly concerned with the themes of isolation, and the resolution of identity through lonliness. In some of the poems a Crusoe figure appears, and is seen as a second Adam, the bearer of an older culture and the first craftsman of the New World. Others are about America, especially New York, and that contrast of climate and cultures with which he is much concerned. It truly has been said of him, 'History has made him a citizen of the world.' Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies, he was in 1957 awarded a Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theatre. Two of his one-act plays have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.