Omeros

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.

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