OMEROS

First UK edition, first printing. Hardcover. Original blue cloth with titles in white to the spine, in dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, with very slight rubbing and bumping to the spine tips and bottom corners. There is a little extremely faint spotting to the top edge of the closed text-block, the contents are otherwise clean throughout and without previous owners' stamps or inscriptions. A previous owner has fixed a small piece of paper which has been signed by Derek Walcott to the front endpaper. Complete with the bright dustwrapper that is rubbed, nicked and creased at the spine tips and flap folds. 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 literature 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.