OMEROS

First UK edition, first printing. Original blue cloth lettered in white to the spine, A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The merest bump visible to the upper outer corner of the front panel. Neatly pencilled ownership name and date of Simon Currie (1938-2022), Leeds-born poet and neurologist, to the front free endpaper. In the bright dustwrapper, rubbed to spine tips and corners. Not price-clipped (£17.50 net to the front flap). Published simultaneously in paperback and cloth editions in the UK, the hardback is uncommon.

Walcott's book-length channelling of, and tribute to, Homerian epic is centred on the island of St. Lucia, where the author was born and (intermittently) lived. At once epic and personal, the poem explores "the visible history charted in events and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile" (from the jacket). Derek Walcott was winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.