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 dispossessed. The epic — the most celebrated of poetic genres, with exemplars from Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — has always arisen at moments when a new national literature seeks to establish itself within the broader tradition of world literature. By the twentieth century, when poetry was dominated by personal lyric and modernist fragment, the epic form was considered all but extinct. Taking full advantage of the great oral tradition of the West Indies, Walcott has endowed a history of conquest, dispossession, and slavery with grandeur and resonance.