(Page 2 of 2)

The gods brought order to Homer's world, but in Mr. Walcott's epic, Odysseus (and all of us who like him are exiles) must return to a home whose character has changed over time, even to the point where we can no longer recognize it. Yet these references to the ancient past, brief and insubstantial as they may seem, form the foundation of Mr. Walcott's poem. They endow his new characters and situations with heroism; they suggest that their experiences, particular as they are to specific places and present times, are also timeless and universal.

''Omeros'' derives its extraordinary power not from suspense, for Mr. Walcott makes us aware in advance of what will happen, but from his ability to capture and express the thoughts of his characters and to re-create, with a remarkable clarity that compels the reader to follow and even to see them, the swift mutations of ideas and images in their minds.

The narrative mimics the process of thinking in several ways. Since we make associations first of all by patterns of sound, there are significant puns, like mer and mere and O-mer-os, or occasional and thus all the more arresting rhymes: ''House of memories that grow / like shadows out of Allan Poe.'' Then there are literary reminiscences, often incomplete, mutated, congested: Achille's lonely, brooding fishing voyages acquire dimension from allusion to Joseph Conrad's ''Nigger of the Narcissus'' or the threatened shipwreck survivor in Winslow Homer's painting ''The Gulf Stream.'' And just when they are needed to punctuate the somber reflections, there are swift transitions to ordinary preoccupations or occasional bitter humor, as when we learn that the waiter struggling with his tray across the sand dunes of a seaside country club is called Lawrence.

Throughout the poem, as in the mind, there are persistent reflections on the historical events that have directly and indirectly shaped the characters' lives: the brutal attacks of the slavers on Achille's African forebears, of Europeans on Native Americans, of French warships against British when the Windward Islands were first colonized; of the impersonal, devastating shelling of armies in World War II. But Mr. Walcott recalls these scenes of death and suffering with the objective sympathy of a Homer, who tells what happened to Trojans as well as Greeks. No loss, individual or collective, is felt more keenly than any other's. The Romans enslaved the Greeks; the Southerners built Greek Revival houses and gave the slaves they mistreated Roman names. Sons are lost, or never born, alike to black and white.

In Homer's day, the only possible medium for epic narrative was poetry, with a strict metrical pattern based on the quantity of sounds. Mr. Walcott uses a rhythmic blank verse to call attention to patterns of sound, and to suggest likeness and contrast with sudden, dramatic metaphors and similes. Although the events of his story take place, as they must, in linear time, over several months, the narration moves in a spiral, replicating the circularity of human thought. The past can easily become present as we remember it: we can talk with the dead, and see them before us, and become the same age as, or even older than, our own parents. We can discover an ancestor who was killed in a war long ago, and begin to mourn for him.

The narrative of ''Omeros'' is exciting and memorable, despite the absence of the chases, duels and descriptions of violent deaths in the Greek epics. At the end, Helen returns to Hector; a war-wounded Englishman in exile finds he can talk to his dead wife with the aid of one Ma Kilman, the wise old woman who runs an establishment called the No Pain Cafe and who also somehow recalls the ancient African remedy that cures old Philoctete's incurable wound. In place of action there is an increasing awareness of other people's suffering. Like Odysseus and the legendary Homer himself, everyone (including the narrator and reader) learns from his or her wandering and exile, even if it is only how better to understand what has happened.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, we discover that it is the remote past, antiquity and military history, that matters, rather than modern concerns about money or self-promotion. Mr. Walcott's epic is a significant and timely reminder that the past is not the property of those who first created it; it always matters to all of us, no matter who we are or where we were born.


I sat on the white terrace waiting for the cheque.


between the full deck-chairs, bouncing to discotheque


He was determined to meet the


Then Lawrence frowned at a mirage . . .

now the mirage

dissolved to a woman with a madras head-tie,

but the head proud, although it was looking for work.

I felt like standing in homage to a beauty


''Who the hell is that?'' a tourist near my table

asked a waitress. The waitress said, ''She? She too proud!''

As the carved lids of the unimaginable

ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,

the waitress sneered, ''Helen.'' And all the rest followed.

From ''Omeros.''

Drawing: Homer (Mark Summers)