Books: Poet's Pot

THE ISLANDS OF UNWISDOM (328 pp.)—Robert Graves—Doubleday ($3.50).

"In this strange and bloody epoch of the sea," pipe Publishers Doubleday, forgetting in their rapture that "epic" is the proper pennant to hoist on such occasions, "Robert Graves turns his incomparable talents to the remarkable Ysabel Barreto —beautiful and dangerous—who used treachery, intrigue, and love to become the first woman admiral in the Spanish navy and then embarked on a perilous voyage, filled with incredible and startling adventures, to the Solomon Islands in search of gold."

This is pretty much what Robert Graves's new novel is all about—except that peppy Ysabel doesn't join the...