Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide to Derek Walcott’s Masterpiece by Maria McGarrity

Abstract

Maria McGarrity. Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide Derek Walcott's Masterpiece. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2015. Pp 240. US$74.95. Since its publication in 1990, Derek Walcott's Omeros has come stand as a monumental work in postcolonial studies and Anglophone literature. Particularly after Swedish Academy named Walcott a Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1992, there has been an outpouring of writing on poem, whether in reviews, journal articles, or book-length studies. For those of us who teach in higher education, Omeros often occupies a seminal place on our syllabi, from sweeping surveys of world literature specialized graduate seminars on globalization and postcolonial poetry. Still, Walcott's of Caribbean poses significant challenges: poem's dense allusiveness, its interweaving of disparate geographies and histories spanning Old World and New, and its intricate, even disjunctive narrative designs, which demand reader's close attention in order appreciate sophistication of Walcott's poetics. Even most patient reader can become overwhelmed by proliferation of associations and wide-ranging references woven into text. Perhaps by virtue of Walcott's extension of Anglo-Modernist precepts of difficulty and complexity, Omeros is frequently compared and, at times, taught alongside James Joyce's Ulysses. There are excellent reference books on Joyce's modern epic, including Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman and The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires. Until recently, however, no comparable apparatus has existed for readers of Walcott. Thankfully, Maria McGarrity has furnished a welcome and indispensable resource for approaching poem's rigorous yet always invigorating networks of meaning in her carefully researched, remarkably illuminating, and refreshingly accessible guidebook, Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide Derek Walcott's Masterpiece. As McGarrity's title suggests, this book is not a traditional piece of literary criticism per se. Rather, Allusions in Omeros aims provide readers--including newcomers and seasoned scholars--with annotations and information on historical, political, cultural, literary, and scholarly materials shaping Walcott's long poem. To do so, she draws upon public domain, delves into archives such as Folk Research Center in Castries, St. Lucia, collaborates with Walcott's friends and contemporaries such as Dunstan St. Omer, and works from full range of existing scholarship on Walcott and Caribbean letters more broadly. Throughout, McGarrity combines a close attention micro-details of Omeros with a broad-angle view macrocontexts shaping poem and Walcott's central preoccupations. The Introduction situates Walcott within a set of interlocking contexts. McGarrity delineates poet's life and works, his relation tradition, his critical reception, and his particular model of cultural hybridity within Caribbean writing. Walcott's abiding strength, in McGarrity's eyes, is derived from his expansive historical and inclusive vision. Walcott, she maintains, seeks transcend the limits of nation and geography and to move beyond boundaries of time, space, language, and culture (7, 15). As she explains, his inclusive vision originates in his particular politics of language, whose syncretism gives positive expression diasporic cultural production even as it negotiates violent historical realities and enduring economic inequalities (8). The capaciousness of Walcott's worldview proves inseparable, moreover, from epic question: how Walcott relates tradition and whether Omeros counts as an poem (9). Epic, in Walcott's hands, is a flexible genre whose spatial extensions and temporal sedimentations--from Hindu epic, Ramayana, Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, through Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Joyce--enable him move past charges of belatcdness or mimicry and toward forging of a truly global poetic consciousness (11). …