I went, when I was in New York last month, to one of the last performances of Derek Walcott's 'The Odyssey' before it closed on June 2, at the end of a six-week run.

It was a sweet experience, with just a hint of bitter lurking at its edge. The bitter was this: the play was put on by the Willow Cabin Theatre Company, a prize-winning group which does three productions a year in New York. They were talented. They were intelligent. They were so enthusiastic and unstinting in what they were doing that you found it difficult to comprehend how they were physically capable of having done all of tonight's leaping around last night as well, and of doing it all again tomorrow night. They unquestionably gave it their very best shot. But they were obviously doing so on a limited budget, and with limited resources - 12 of their 16 actors, for example, had more than one part to play. Ultimately, it was just too big. Their struggle with its size made it impossible for the audience ever to reach that magic moment when the theatre vanishes and the only reality becomes what happens on the stage. But there was so much that was thrilling about the performance that this modest reservation pales to insignificance.

First, there was the thrill of being around genius. Derek Walcott is one of the best poets alive, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, five years after it was awarded to his Russian ?migr? poet friend, Joseph Brodsky, and three years before the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. That's some company.

Then, there was fascination at the use he makes of Homer - his long poem Omeros, (which is what the Greeks call Homer) published in 1990, is a distillation of references to the Iliad and the Odyssey of the distant past into the quintessence of the St Lucian present. Omeros is all Caribbean with Mediterranean references. In The Odyssey, the emphasis is the opposite, but that changes little, as if the kaleidoscope had been given the very smallest of turns. Since Walcott is a Caribbean writer, there was for me a feeling of complicity - of shared experience and understanding of the way the world works.

Finally, and best of all, there was the thrill of discovering that this is a wonderful play, full of English as ripe and juicy as mangoes. One hopes it will be put on again by a company that has the money to do it full justice, in an all-mod cons theatre. Then, it will be worth selling the farm to get there.

The first two lines of Walcott's Odyssey are from Blind Billy Blue, a troubadour who helps the audience steer a course of understanding through the sometimes complex unfolding of the plot:

"Gone sing 'bout that man because his stories please us,

Who saw trials and tempests for ten years after Troy."

Believe me, it isn't just because his stories please us that Walcott writes about Odysseus. Walcott is deeply troubled by the cultural displacement of Caribbean people, and by their marginalisation at the hands of … well, lets say the rest of the world, for the sake of brevity. Omeros and Odyssey are metaphors and showcases for his concern. Walcott is easy to read, if reading for you is sliding over the surface from the beginning to the end. He has said that in using language, his aim is "that a West Indian or an Englishman could read a single poem, each with his own accent, without either one feeling that it was written in dialect."

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security. Really, he is an extremely difficult poet to read, in the sense that he lays on meaning in his work in the same way mediaeval Japanese artisans laid lacquer on wood - thin layer upon layer upon countless layers. You never quite know how far away the wood of Walcott's meaning lies. Listen to this - it is taken from Omeros, in which Helen is a young St Lucian woman, but also a metaphor for St. Lucia itself, which has been called the Helen of the West Indies, because of its beauty. Major Plunkett, an Englishman, realises who and what she is one afternoon in a bar where he is having a drink with his wife.

" 'There's our trouble,' Maud muttered into her glass. In a gust that leant the triangular sails of the surfers, Plunkett saw the pride of Helen passing In the same yellow frock Maud had altered for her.

'She looks better in it' - Maud smiled - 'but the girl lies so much, and she stole. What'll happen to her life?'" He says he doesn't know, but then, much later: "He remembered the flash of illumination in the empty bar - that the island was Helen, and how it darkened the deep humiliation He suffered for her and the lemon frock. Back then, lightning could lance him with historic regret as he watched the island through the slanted monsoon That wrecked then refreshed her. Well, he had paid the debt.

The breakers had threshed her name with the very sound The midshipman heard. He had given her a son."

See what I mean? This poem is 325 pages long and there isn't a single word wasted. If you let your attention lapse for a second, you're going to miss something the size of a cruise ship. In his Nobel Lecture, given in December of 1992, Walcott says: "…In our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob, and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating Yellow Bird and Banana Boat Song to death."

In The Odyssey, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, after years of suffering, where he is not recognised and where he finds his wife besieged by suitors trying to marry her and usurp his estate. For the audience, Billy Blue sings: "Imagine the bitter ecstasy of Odysseus.

Imagine, after a hard night, coming home to your door… 'Ain't your house no more, your dog, your old lady, your cat, Your son, your chair, your old coffee cup, you're a bum.

A doormat marked 'Welcome', they scrape their soles on your heart And you can't do nothing about it, wouldn't that be sump'n?'" Sound familiar? Don't we Bermudians sometimes sing a tune like that one? Back to Walcott's Nobel lecture: "That is what I have read around me from boyhood, from the beginnings of poetry, the grace of effort. In the hard mahogany of woodcutters: faces, resinous men, charcoal burners; in a man with a cutlass cradled across his forearm, who stands on the verge with the usual anonymous khaki dog; in the extra clothes he put on this morning, when it was cold when he rose in the thinning dark to go and make his garden in the heights - the heights, the garden, being miles away from his house, but that is where he has his land - not to mention the fishermen, the footmen on trucks, …all fragments of Africa originally but shaped and hardened in the island's life, illiterate in the way leaves are illiterate; they do not read, they are there to be read, and if they are properly read, they create their own literature…

"How quickly it could all disappear! And how it is beginning to drive us further into where we hope are impenetrable places, green secrets at the end of bad roads, headlands where the next view is not of a hotel but of some long beach without a figure and the hanging question of some fisherman's smoke at its far end. The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights. Its peasantry and its fishermen are not there to be loved, or even photographed; they are trees who sweat, and whose bark is filmed with salt, but every day on some island, rootless trees in suits are signing favourable tax breaks with entrepreneurs, poisoning the sea almond and the spice laurel of the mountains to their roots. A morning could come in which governments might ask what happened, not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole people."

But don't get trapped by that any more than Walcott, ultimately, lets it trap him. Odysseus, when he returns to Ithaca, has the rest of his life ahead of him. At the end of Omeros, Helen, too, looks well-placed to lead a happy life.

"Break a vase," Walcott has said, "and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole... Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent…"

"For every poet, it is always morning in the world, History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History."

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