Omeros by Derek Walcott (1990)

At dawn the fishermen fell the gommier trees they will hollow into canoes, the poem's first act of making, and from there Derek Walcott does something audacious. He hands a St. Lucian fisherman the name Achille, gives his rival the name Hector, and makes the woman they both love a housemaid named Helen. This is not parody but a claim, pressed in Dante's terza rima across St. Lucia, Boston, London, and the African coast Achille rows back to in a vision of his stolen ancestors: that a man hauling a pirogue carries the same epic weight as anyone at Troy. The wound at the poem's centre belongs to Philoctete, a gash from a rusted anchor that will not close, the whole history of the Middle Passage festering in one shin. Listen to how the verse braids English and Creole until neither tongue could say alone what the two say together. The sea here keeps every name the history books let drown.