November book: Omeros by Derek Walcott

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Let us continue our journey with a modern retelling of the Odyssey...

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.

Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, was one of the greatest English-language poets of the late twentieth century, equalled only by Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück. The title, Omeros, refers to Homer, and one strand of Walcott’s book-length poem reimagines Caribbean fishermen through the lens of the Trojan War. But there is much more going on: the poem is also about the nature of history, art, and language, the possibility of a world that fully includes the...