Omeros - by Derek Walcott (Paperback)

About the Book

A poem of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events-- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement--and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Book Synopsis

The grand epic poem from the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott.

Omeros, named for Homer--that other chronicler of conflict and homecoming--is the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's epic poem of the Atlantic. In scenes from St. Lucia, England, Massachusetts, and Lakota territory, Walcott offers history on a grand scale--replete with the horrors of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade--as well as the interior story of private suffering and individual exile. In musical and agile lines, as unpredictable and unceasing as the sea itself, Walcott forges an Odyssey for the Americas and an enduring story of Caribbean selfhood, a work that is alive to the present and enriched by the deep, seductive rhythms of the past.

"One of the great poems of our time." --John Lucas, New Statesman

Review Quotes

"No poet rivals Mr. Walcott in humor, emotional depth, lavish inventiveness in language, or the ability to express the thoughts of his characters and compel the reader to follow the swift mutations of ideas and images in their minds. This wonderful story moves in a spiral, replicating human thought, and in the end, surprisingly, it makes us realize that history, all of it, belongs to us." --Mary Lefkowitz, The New York Times Book Review (an Editors' Choice/Best Book of 1990 selection)

"Characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands; black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy as they go their complicated ways . . . Wit and verbal play . . . enliven every page of this extraordinary poem . . . A constant source of surprise and delight from stanza to stanza, a music so subtle, so varied, so exquisitely right that it never once, in more than eight thousand lines, strikes a false note." --Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books

"One of the great poems of our time." --John Lucas, New Statesman and Society

About the Author

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.