Tiepolo's Hound

About this book

From the Nobel laureate a "resplently luminous" (Paul Gray Time) book-length poem on two educations in painting a century apart.Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;my awe of the ordinary because even as I write paused on a step of this couplet I have never foundits image again a hound in astounding light.Tiepolos Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro born in 1830 leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris. The poet himself hunts for a detail -- "a slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" -- of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the minds eye in search of a connection between the lost actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-six of Derek Walcotts own paintings the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-exile a history in verse of Impressionist painting and a memoir of the poets desire to catch the visual world in more than words.