Omeros

Omeros is an epic poem, seven books and sixty four chapters long, written in a loose adaptation of Dante's three line stanza that Derek Walcott bends and stretches rather than following strictly. Its central figures are two fishermen on the island of Saint Lucia, Achille and Hector, whose rivalry over a woman named Helen gives the poem its through line, while the island itself carries the name Helen too, a nod to Saint Lucia's old colonial nickname, the Helen of the West Indies, fought over by the French and British the way Homer's Helen was fought over by Greeks and Trojans. Walcott moves the poem well beyond that single triangle, weaving in a second thread following Major Plunkett, a British colonial veteran, and his wife Maud, as they work through the weight of the island's colonial history, and a third, autobiographical thread in Walcott's own voice, moving between Saint Lucia and New England along with detours to Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome and Toronto.

As the island modernizes, Hector gives up the sea for work driving a share taxi in Saint Lucia's growing towns, a change the poem treats as costing him something real even as it changes his fortunes, and he does not survive to see the poem's end. Achille, who never leaves his life as a fisherman, eventually reconciles with Helen, the two of them settling into something closer to peace than the poem's earlier rivalry ever suggested was possible. Walcott's own narrative strand closes through a guiding figure drawn from Homer himself, a presence that leads the poet through something like a personal reckoning toward the book's final calm.

Reading Omeros means moving between registers, epic, personal, historical, without much warning, and it rewards a reader willing to let the Homeric names function as a claim on inheritance rather than as parody or borrowed prestige. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of 1990, and critic Hilton Als later called it Walcott's masterpiece.