Omeros

Walcott's book-length epic recasts Homer among the fishermen of St Lucia: Achille and Hector, who quarrel over the beautiful Helen; the wounded Philoctete; and the blind Seven Seas, the island's Omeros. Across the real island, from the fishing village of Gros Islet and the sea the men work, to the capital at Castries and the volcanic Pitons, the poem weaves the Aegean and the Caribbean, slavery's Middle Passage and the everyday life of a small Antillean nation into one great song of the sea.

Achille

Gros Islet (the village)

Book One

In the fishing village the men fell the trees to make their canoes and put out to sea, and Achille and Hector, friends turned rivals, fall out over the beautiful Helen. Walcott begins in the ordinary life of a St Lucian village, and lets its fishermen carry the weight of Homer's heroes without ever ceasing to be themselves.

Book One

explicit The fishermen of the poem live in a St Lucian village drawn from Gros Islet on the island's north coast, a real fishing settlement; sited there.

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