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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780374523503
ISBN: 0374523509
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 325
Publication Date: 1992-06-01
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Epic
Review: Exploring the relationships between natives, tourists, and nature, Walcott moves beyond just our relationships with one another to create this modern epic. Evocative of the Iliad with its battles between Hector and Achille over the yellow-dressed Helen, Omeros moves beyond just the interactions of the natives to greater themes.

There are many exciting parts to the poem: the beauty of the language, the themes, that it was only on the second time reading Omeros that I realized it rhymed, such is the seeming effortlessness with which Walcott writes. It is a modern epic for the way it is able to really explore human relationships with one another, with the trees, with people invading our indigenous societies.

Walcott manages to focus on a few people in spite of the seemingly huge scope of Omeros, and this makes the book much more deeply enjoyable. I recommend it heartily.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Walcott's Omeros
Review: Omeros ! A treat for the lover of language. Much has been and will be written of this literary challenge : plot, characters, and segueing epic; but little will ever do justice to the heart of the matter,- ( which demands this conscious encomium.)

What for Habermas is the ideal of communicative action is celebrated in Walcott as the action of poetic communication. Walcott paints.

On every page, he offers the reader a life time of disciplined observation - the fruit of which he dispenses with prodigal largesse.

This humble, almost unconscious master of metaphor is able to enter unerringly into the consciousness of things and to emerge from that dive with pearls, whose inner flower-flames he unfurls or explodes in liquid light for the benefit of all.

One wishes that Omeros had remained faithful to its native soil - the simple wisdom of Aristotelian unity. The manifold may well be too vast and seems to dilute the poetic distillation. ( Though the genre itself and Walcott's coupled ethnicity exculpate, one still wishes ...etc.)

The work is all done in and as an act of love; still, a brochetting irk pensiles in the mind :
How can a love so in love with its art and the art of its art be anything but artful.

Anticipating the critics who - like he says elsewhere - would spaniel after him like an old stag to hang their theses on the exclamations of his antlers, Walcott may well have an answer to this and other squibs. His arrowing sea-swift Omeros veers and scales with extra territorial sui generis facticity.

The rich pyrotechnics of his fractaling passion, is, like a flung star, a challenge to young energetic poets like Colin Carberry of Ireland , Kendel Hippolyte and Mc.Donald Dixon from the Islands.

Omeros should hold a prominent place on every bookshelf.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Postcolonial Homer
Review: Walcott confidently feels his way into epic form, borrowing the blind eyes of Homer and tropes from Homer's tales. Jam-packed with craft, OMEROS' Dantesque tercets make hairpin turns on the pinpoints of vowels and consonants. Walcott is nothing if not evocative, calling forth the spirits of breadfruit, waves, Plains Indians, sunken treasure, sea creatures and all his other muses with a music that is beyond sounds.

For all the great poetry, what fans of the modern epic will miss in OMEROS is a narrative through-line. Structurally, it is more like William Carlos Williams' PATERSON or especially Hart Crane's THE BRIDGE, than like THE ILLIAD or THE ODYSSEY. The stories in the poem are given secondary importance to the ideas. While I will not disagree with other reviewers' characterizations of the characters as 'well-developed,' I will say that Walcott gives his characters very little to do. The greatest journey is the one taken by the un-named narrator (who seems to be prowling the University Poet circuit from the Carribean to the U.S. to England). Those who want a story with their modern epic are directed to THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER by James Merrill.

What Walcott offers in place of narrative is recollections, meditations and essays on a post-colonial world. Certain human motifs are bound to repeat, he says, and demonstrates with the story of fishermen Hector and Achille fighting for the island girl in the yellow dress, Helen. To me, Omeros is really a collection of poems in a similar form spiralling around similar themes, taking up each others' melodies in different keys. Like any symphony, it sometimes gets lost. But its individual passages are, more often than not, magnificent -- and beautiful to hear.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The worst poem it has ever been my fire's misfortune to burn
Review: Why is it not possible to bestow 0 stars upon an item? I cannot express deeply enough how horrible this 320-some-odd-page poem is. It is the longest complaint I have ever had to trudge through. That is all it is. One long list of complaints. All the narrator does throughout the piece is whine about the same things. A repetative compliation of meaningless and monotonous rants about where he belongs in life, and what makes them so tedious is the fact that you can never relate to the man, so there is no way to feel remorse. I will admit that there are some eloquent descriptions and very mild humour, but it is not enough to save this tragically wordy, muddled, vague, boring, unoriginal, god-please-take-me-now tribute to an overrated classics writer. Save yourself the long nights and headaches....Stay far, far away!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: what you read is true
Review: My review title shouldn't be construed as me claiming any knowledge re: Caribbean culture/history, or indeed -any- of the experiences of the disenfranchised peoples this book touches on. All I can say is that the glowing reviews here on Amazon are accurate. Walcott's poetry is supple almost beyond belief: so facile and brilliant that it would stand between the reader and the subject if Walcott himself didn't admit that, yes, he can be awfully facile and brilliant with the English language! The writer walks a dozen dangerous lines - among them, the could-be-precious placing of himself in his own poem - and walks away triumphant from every single challenge.

If you are looking for a linear "story" in the tradition of Homer but transplanted to a Caribbean locale, this isn't it. If however you are looking for great poetry and the understanding of others (and yourself) that great poetry can bring, then it is right here. OMEROS is eminently worth your time.

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