Current & Various

FROM THE GREEN ANTILLES edited and introduced by Barbara Howes. 368 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

St.-John Perse (Seamarks) was born on an islet off Guadeloupe. Edgar Mittelholzer (Shadows Move Among Them) came from British Guiana. V. S. Naipaul (A House for Mr. Biswas) grew up in Trinidad. George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin) is a Barbadian. In the last generation, a torrent of literary talent has come surging out of the Caribbean like a Gulf Stream of the spirit. In the new generation, the stream has been strengthened by a number of remarkable young writers--among them an important lyric poet (Derek Walcott), an insightful critic (L. E. Brathwaite) and dozens of gifted storytellers (V. S. Reid, Samuel Selvon, Clement Richer, Lydia Cabrera, Albert Helman). Many of them are Negro or part-Negro, and they write in several languages (Dutch, English, French, Spanish). Their works, sampled in this arresting anthology by U.S. Poet Barbara Howes, insistently betray a family resemblance. They are earthy, passionate, gay, fantastic, funny--on the whole, more emotional than intellectual. In short, these writers are unmistakably cut from the same strongly colored cloth as the greatest of all authors of Caribbean descent: Alexander Dumas.

THE SECRET ISLANDS by Franklin Russell. 238 pages. Norton. $5.95.

"My feeling about islands is not normal," confesses Author Russell, who was born on an island--New Zealand's South Island--and who, like sea birds feels uncomfortable nesting anywhere but on rock castles moated by the deeps One summer, his spirit choked by 15 years of urban life as a journalist in Manhattan, Russell headed north on the scent of some wave-swept map specks off Newfoundland's and Nov Scotia's stern coasts. Among them were Hay Island, periodically exposed to it roots by the incredible fall of the Fundy tide, and Funk Island, on whose granite crest the great auk passed into extinction. Russell effectively translates for nonislomanes the mystical tug of the secret places offshore, "priceless monuments of primeval earth."

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