Product Description

There are two currents of history in the author's poem, the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian and the tragedy of African enslavement - and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15614 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In word and thought, scale and ambition Omeros, is an epic poem, providing yet further testimony to the world status of its St Lucian author, Derek Walcott. Setting out to reimagine the lives and voices of the ordinary people of the Caribbean through Greek myth and epic, Walcott constructs a heightened, and richly nuanced, vernacular able to impart the resonant narrative voices of his tale told predominantly in terza rima. These voices, far from being anachronistic or redundant, capture the essence of the Caribbean demotic in its combination of the old world and the new. Written in seven books in 64 chapters, Omeros, describes the spiritual-ancestral-journey of its black hero, Achille, his jealous love of Helen, the most beautiful black woman on the island, the search for integration and renewal by the white protagonist, Blunkett, and the curing of the wound of Philoctete by Ma Kilman, owner of the No Pain Cafe. It concludes with the story of the I-narrator, whose Greek girlfriend leaves him to go home. If the history of the Caribbean tells of a wounded divide, an enforced severance between peoples and races which the multiplicity and inclusiveness of its culture somewhat belies, in Omeros, Walcott has sought to weave these stories and strands together at the level of both theme and metaphor, intertextual symbols and myth. Transcending the warring impulses of the region's history, Omeros is definitely an epic for the New World. --David Marriott

Customer Reviews

A Rare Gem
This book one a prize or two, and attracted a lot of attention for Walcott. Maybe it was the book that swung him the Nobel Prize. There were, of course, severe critics. Craig Raine, for example. Does anyone remember that review: 'With Walcott, Homer means Coma...' No, he didn't like it. Which is his loss, I guess. But then, Walcott has always been received better in the US than he has in the UK. Readers here are perhaps uncomfortable about Walcott's tendency to speak 'for' the people of his Caribbean. But then again, maybe it is inappropriate for white middle class readers here to expect a diffidence more in line with their own etiquette than that of the West Indies, which is, of course, trying to assert an emerging identity, rather than trying to modestly demur from an Imperialist one. (Though there are British writers who employ similar strategies - Tony Harrison, for example) I don't think there have been many intelligent British readings of Walcott. Another problem is maybe a tendency for this writer to be serious, or, worse still for some people, 'earnest'. 'Omeros' can be a grave book. It plays with a tragic and an epic dimension: it renders the sufferings of ordinary Caribbean individuals with great care and sympathy. Don't be deceived. There is a subtle wit and humour always at work with Walcott. But perhaps what's most valuable about this book is the way it encourages us to readdress the classics as well, and ask the old questions about race, heroism, honour, home, identity, history and countless other timeless themes. You'll need to read and re-read this one. Walcott has a subtle accumulative power. His stanzas wash back and forth like waves against the shore. What at first might appear ordinary slowly begins to take on a deeper and deeper dimension. Go on. Make the effort. Books like this don't get written very often.

so rich and never full of itself
I didn't know the work of Derek Walcott until I ran into this book. What an amazing book it is! I used to dislike epic poems - they usually just ramble on and on, preferably made to rhyme in the correct places but in such a way that all life is taken out of the lines. This book is different & its author is no less than a genius.

Sometimes I can't really grasp the meaning of a passage, but it doesn't really matter - each page in this book is so full of the most brilliant images & visions, that it almost seems like a book in itself. And although it's so impossibly rich in smells, colours & sounds, it never succumbs, thank God, to the kind of self-importance that sometimes overshadows the work of other truly great writers.

Epic modernism
I like Classical culture and literature, so when I heard Derek Walcott on the World Book Club, I decided to buy this book. Excellent book and excellent service.