Omeros

Omeros is the Greek name for Homer and though Derek Walcott’s protagonists, Achille and Philoctete, are simple fishermen, they and their tribulations take on the specific gravity and resonance of their mythic Greek namesakes. Walcott’s magnificent poem charts both the visible history of events and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

‘Derek Walcott has moved with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess. It can be incantatory and self-entrancing . . . It can be athletic and demotic . . . It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words.’ Seamus Heaney

‘For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or “a world”; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.’ Joseph Brodsky