Omeros

The grand epic poem from the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott.

Omeros, named for Homer—that other chronicler of conflict and homecoming—is the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott’s epic poem of the Atlantic. In scenes from St. Lucia, England, Massachusetts, and Lakota territory, Walcott offers history on a grand scale—replete with the horrors of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade—as well as the interior story of private suffering and individual exile. In musical and agile lines, as unpredictable and unceasing as the sea itself, Walcott forges an Odyssey for the Americas and an enduring story of Caribbean selfhood, a work that is alive to the present and enriched by the deep, seductive rhythms of the past.

“One of the great poems of our time.” —John Lucas, New Statesman