Making Epic Connections

...The poet goes back in time to visit some of his ancestors, then plunges deep into prehistory when the world's water surrounded one single land mass, Pangea, whose break-up created our present continents...

...Born on St...

...Stunted as they may seem from the outside, each of these dreamers enriches his or her inner existence by latching on to an ideal —in two cases poetry, in one the manic inventiveness epitomized by Thomas Edison...

...While Achille, Hector and Helen act out a condensed version of The Iliad, the Major and Maud represent a "khaki Ulysses" and his Penelope...

...Omeros (the Greek name for Homer) boasts a gigantic cast of characters...

...Walcott concludes that "Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched/roof to a concrete factory...

...This proto-earth represents Eden for Leithauser...

...His wife judges Helen harshly for her thieving propensities and her fickleness, but the Major feels compassion for her...

...All the places and cultures depicted have contributed to the eclectic tenor oflife on St...

...In every city, some new Omeros sits forging an epic of his peoples' broken lives, making them seem meaningful in retrospect...

...and the ancient blind sailor Seven Seas, an avatar of Omeros...

...On the steps of a New York museum, the poet imagines that he has spotted Captain Ahab passing in a taxi, and that he is Queequeg, the Pacific Island harpooner...

...Ma Kilman, an Obeahn sibyl, and proprietor of the "No Pain Cafe...

...His eye will note how a knot of sleeping pythons in the zoo resemble a plexus—one of those intricately interwoven bundles of nerve endings in our brain—and therefore suggests a kinship between what we see and what gives us the ability to observe...

...Moreover, Plunkett, Achille, Seven Seas, and the rest of the dramatis personae represent aspects of the poet as well as of the island...

...But times were no simpler then, as evidenced by the vulgar rhyme upon her name chanted by the schoolboys—another universal kind of poetry...

...The fisherman, Achille, falls out with his best friend, Hector, over the wanton Helen, whose beauty captivates everyone who sees her...

...beauty spot] of the West Indies...

...Leithauser's schoolmarm great aunt, Lucinda Stitt, taught her students Longfellow in one such classroom overlooking Hiawatha's "shining Big-Sea-Water," Lake Superior—"so/The right imagination might ever be lifted/At having read, early on, lines and lake / Together...

...Then there are Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, who exemplify a different aspect of life in the islands...

...Lucia...

...Neither blacks nor whites are indigenous to the Caribbean...

...He aptly imagines senility as "Doors going shut, minutely, one/By one inside one's head," disconnecting us from the memories and ideas that make us whole...

...At the center of the story Walcott places a love triangle...

...Lucia...

...But this book's character sketches—some of his strongest work to date—reveal a hitherto unapparent sense of compassion...

...Lucia, of mixed European-African origin, this poet has always been fascinated by the way cultures intersect...

...Reminding himself that most citizens of the United States do not descend from the land's original people, he describes how, on the Great Plains, "my face froze in the ice-cream paradiso / of the American dream, like the Sioux in the snow...

...This elderly couple are survivors of the colonial era...

...The central question Omeros asks is: How do we lay claim to our true culture...

...Inventing his characters on the terraceof oneof thehotels, he ponders his motives: "Didn't I want the poor / to stay in the same light so that I could transfix / them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, / / preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks / to that blue bus stop...

...He abhors separation...

...Both the frustrated schoolteacher and Leithauser's eccentricuncle, an unsuccessful inventor, showthemselves to be archetypes of the poet...

...A Polish waitress in Toronto conjures up poets who wrote in political exile for decades: Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz...

...At any rate, such is Derek Walcott's premise in his latest poem, Omeros (Farrar Straus Giroux, 325 pp., $25.00...

...when would I not hear the Trojan War / in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman's shop...

...The primitive boats that navigate the shoals around the Windward Islands might well evoke visions of Aegean Bronze Age seafarers...

...the measured prose I read as a school boy...

...Yet Achille cannot feel at home in Africa, while Plunkett would be a failure in England...

...All three, descendants of the African slaves imported in the 18th century, are natives of Gros Ilot, a fishing village on the northwest coast of St...

...Brad Leithauser has not, as yet, aspired to rival Homer...

...Aware from his reading how physical beauty like Helen's caused the conflict that destroyed Troy, Plunkett decides to exonerate her by writing the history of his chosen country in the heroic mold, so that everyone can understand St...

...Didn't I prefer a road/ from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax...

...Surrounded by British artifacts—the Major's military histories, Maud's piano and Irish song books—they have nonetheless devoted themselves to the welfare of St...

...His classical education trained him to identify with the Greek and Roman literary traditions, and with writers like Alexander Pope who adapted epics, idylls and satires to English meter...

...In Book III of the poem, for example, Achilleis knocked unconscious as a result of a fishing accident and, in a vision, visits his ancestral home in Benin...

...On the banks of Dublin's Liffey, Walcott toasts "our age's Omeros, James Joyce, who understood the paradox of belonging to a people so oppressed they can only write in the conqueror's language...

...The poet confesses that he based the couple on his parents, and that he is the poem's Telemachus, searching for his literary parentage...

...Lucia—"the Helen [i.e...

...Vignettes in The Mail from Any where bear postmarks from cities as diverse as Reykjavik, Bangkok and Kyoto, and climates ranging from subtropical to Arctic...

...In the 19th century, as writers in the United States worried about seeming too British, Longfellow devised epics of the American experience—most notably Hiawatha—to reassure his compatriots that our native legends and landscapes were as conducive to inspiration as Arcadian hills or England's Lake District...

...All three pursue "the alchemist's lead-fueled notion/Of alasting conversion to glory...

...The Greek Revival architecture of Georgia towns like Athens and Troy recalls to him that the namesakes of these places also once predicated their civilization on slavery...

...in fact, the only original inhabitants St...

...London seems haunted by the shade of Eliot, who identified so powerfully with British literature that he changed his citizenship...

...In the past, Leithauser's verse tended to explore unpeopled landscapes...

...By successfully weaving so many diverse strands together in the Penelope web of this epic, Derek Walcott has shown himself to be another Omeros...

...When wouldmy head shake off its echoes likea horse/ / shaking off a wreath of flies...

...Walcott, another kind of colonial, agonizes about claiming the English poetic tradition as his native idiom, because to him this seems equivalent to the Major's phony rank...

...Though Plunkett is a bit of a fraud (his military rank turns out to be self-bestowed), he emerges as the story's most engaging character...

...He is similarly uneasy about his use of the Homeric conceit: "All that Greek manure under the green bananas, / under the indigo hills, the rain-rutted road, / the galvanized village, the myth of rustic manners, / /glazed by the transparent page of what I had read...

...Brad Leithauser, in his third verse collection, The Mail from Anywhere (Knopf, 71 pp., $19.95), includes a poem that invokes the era of our national sagas, when the noble faces of William Cullen Bryant, Sidney Lanier and Henry Wads worth himself, challenged every student from the walls of high schools to be worthy of great literature...

...Writers & Writing MAKING EPIC CONNECTIONS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Suppose that Homer's Muse, after singing about the wrath of Achilles on the plains of Troy and the wanderings of Ithaca's chieftain, Odysseus, chose to celebrate the exploits of contemporary Caribbean fishermen...

...Virgil composed the Aeneid to demonstrate that Roman writing was more than a pale imitation ? f Greek forms and themes...

...Leithauser, like Walcott, has established himself as a wanderer...

...Lucia can claim are iguanas...

...but he has begun to write the epic of our lives—making the connections that help us live with understanding and purpose...

...By the time Walcott returns to resolve the predicaments of his Caribbean characters, the reader understands that his long digression is as central to the theme as his characters' fates...

...In recasting Homer's poems as dramas of current life in the Antilles, Walcott makes some profound observations about how our appropriation of history helps us to understand ourselves...

...Poets often resort to epic when they wish to prove that their literary tradition possesses a unique origin and history...

...His poems aim to re-establish broken links, to find verse relationships between the seemingly incongruous...

...In search of some answers, Walcott leads his poem on a historical and literary pilgrimage...

...But another part of his heritage comprises the French patois spoken on his native island and customs that mix Roman Catholic religion, British colonial values and Obeah—West African magic brought to the area by slaves...

...Thus, in the mangrove swamps, he meets his forebear Afalobe, and (shades of Roots) hears the epic of his people sung by a griot, or West African storyteller—another Homeric figure...

...Having spent almost three decades establishing himself as a cosmopolitan writer, Walcott describes himself in Omeros returning to his childhood home as a tourist...

...Helen'sdesertion of Achille for his buddy is described through the eyes of some of their neighbors, including Philoctete, a former fisherman with an incurable leg wound...

...Lucia's culture to be noble and worthy...

...Not all the action, however, takes place among these dialect-speaking natives...

...Even its birds are colonizers...