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Maria McGarrity. Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide to 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 to stand as a monumental work in postcolonial studies and global Anglophone literature. Particularly after the Swedish Academy named Walcott a Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1992, there has been an outpouring of writing on the 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 to specialized graduate seminars on globalization and postcolonial poetry. Still, Walcott's epic of the Caribbean poses significant challenges: the 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 the reader's close attention in order to appreciate the sophistication of Walcott's global poetics. Even the most patient reader can become overwhelmed by the proliferation of associations and wide-ranging references woven into the text.
Perhaps by virtue of Walcott's extension of Anglo-Modernist precepts of difficulty and complexity, Omeros is frequently compared to 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 the 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 to 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 to provide readers-including newcomers and seasoned scholars-with annotations and information on the historical, political, cultural, literary, and scholarly materials shaping Walcott's long poem. To do so, she draws upon the public domain, delves...