“Walcott’s poetry is always a reminder of how limited, how crippled, our daily thinking about common experience is, offers us his heart, a gift that reminds us what’s out there, in here.”

Let’s start with the obvious: this is Walcott not necessarily at his best, but certainly at his most ambitious, and for that this is a challenging read, one that I would not recommend for casual poetry lovers but for those interested in the layering of history and mythological narratives which underlay St. Lucia’s most banal of contemporary lives.

Yes, this is a monumental (re: quite lengthy and dense) work of verse which melds the classical Homeric myths with island stories. More, though, Walcott also simultaneously provides us historical accounts of colonization by the British and a personal narrative of his own role in producing the work as part of its own struggle. More, he takes his characters to far-ranging visions, from pre-conquest Africa to the struggles of the Sioux, culminating in a future-looking vision quest. Did I forget to suggest that the colonial language compelled upon these verses also is just as much a character? And all of this, more or less, is accomplished within the same storyline and characters.

How and why? Because for Omeros, global history and myth create the inevitability of identity but not necessarily act as determiners for the future. Now that’s one of my very general takes; the nuances of this require a lengthier study. In this sense, what Walcott has pulled off here is something on the order of R. Ellison, Joyce, or Marquez in original style and reach.

Not every tercet strikes true, reveals itself easily. Some are just fine poetry of scene, widening the lush and vibrant island life or work of fishing. Others slip to quasi-internal dialogues of characters who we cannot immediately identify or anchor ourselves to, largely because they echo simultaneously across Walcott’s layered stories. And, as readers seek an anchor from which to identify a coherent plot point, so too do characters themselves struggle with their ceaseless displacements and resettlements. In this sense, the nature of the telling reflects the work’s themes.

All this to suggest that judging Omeros after a partial or even a full single read is unfair to its purpose. Read it first to take in its breadth and manner; then yes, read it again to discover how it reveals itself, its expansiveness and reverence and wounds and dreams. Walcott’s poetry is always a reminder of how limited, how crippled, our daily thinking about common experience is, offers us his heart, a gift that reminds us what’s out there, in here.