SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. “Making Blind Birds Sing.” Parnassus 17, no. 2 (February 1993): 361–75.

In the following review of Omeros, Birkerts praises Walcott's poetic genius, but finds serious shortcomings in the work's overly ambitious epic design.

When Derek Walcott published his Selected Poems in 1964, Robert Graves wrote: “Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his contemporaries.” A generous and astute bit of praise, one that has served the Caribbean-born poet as a kind of career benediction. For it is precisely this sensitivity to the “inner magic” of the language—that mysterious agency through which sounds and their rhythmic arrangement propagate sense—that has kept Walcott's poetry supple and energetic in an era when these qualities are in especially short supply. Indeed, Walcott is one of the very few poets around who keeps getting stronger with age: more inventive, more tolerant of...