WALCOTT, Derek.

£2,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Omeros. First edition, inscribed by the author to his editor on the front free endpaper, "To Pat, who might have ruined this book, but thank God, fled to the labyrinth of the New Yorker. Joke! Joke! Derek, Sept 12 / 90." Loosely inserted is the card of the publisher Roger Williams Straus, inscribed by him with "love" in red ink. Patricia Strachan worked with Walcott from Another Life (1973) to Collected Poems (1986), a tumultuous period in the poet's life, during which she became not only his editor but his "booker of lectures and readings, organizer, secretary, correspondent. At times she appears the only stability in his life, the only one with an overview of where he should be and what he was writing. She often was planning his readings and stints as writer in residence a year in advance; reading tours coincided with the publication of books or the productions of plays" (King, pp. 381-2).The inscription refers to Strachan's decision to leave Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1988 to become fiction editor at the New Yorker. During her 17 years at the publishing house she worked with a number of high-profile writers including Seamus Heaney, Jamaica Kincaid, and James Kelman. The New York Times called Omeros Walcott's finest poetical work; a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, a homecoming story which begins and ends on the island of St Lucia. "Walcott revisits the canonical works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and Hart Crane because they epitomize the

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