I've now got the final two books of Omeros left before I will have completed my second reading of Walcott's beguiling epic in verse. This time round I think I've seen, or, rather, felt more clearly than the first the main concern of the poem: the burden of History, the weight of injustice upon the dispossessed. In the middle books of the poem this is outlined with hypnotic, distressing power; they demand to be read slowly, not so much to savour as to suffocate.
In some ways the poem is feverish in its impact. The first time I read it I grasped some of its hallucinatory brilliance, but wasn't really made ill. This time round I've succumbed.
Can we be infected by a work of art?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment