Tiepolo's Hound

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.Tiepolo's 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 mind's 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 Walcott's 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 poet's desire to catch the visual world in more than words.

• Author
• Derek Walcott

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 208

• Publisher
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-374-52779-2

• EAN
• 9780374527792

• Genres
• poetry, art

• Release date
• 2001