SOURCE: Benfey, Christopher. “Coming Home.” New Republic 203, no. 18 (29 October 1990): 36–39.

In the following review, Benfey offers a mixed assessment of Omeros, finding shortcomings in the volume's ineffective “imaginative journeys” and unusual metrical patterns.

In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson divides the things of the world into those that fly (“Birds—Hours—the Bumblebee”) and those that stay (“Grief—Hills—Eternity”). The division might be applied to poets. Dickinson herself was notoriously a stayer, and so in their different ways were Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and—once he'd found a resting place in New England—Robert Frost. Among the poets of flight, one thinks of Eliot and Pound, and of Elizabeth Bishop, who split her time between Boston and Brazil.

Bishop especially took what she called “questions of travel” as her province, and the same could be said of the sometimes Trinidadian, sometimes Bostonian Derek Walcott. Among his...