Tiepolo's Hound - Softcover

'This is a rich, hugely ambitious work, the mighty poem of a major poet in the full flight of his authority and curiosity, a Victorian-scale construction which thrilled me and which I will read again and again.' Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph; 'Tiepolo's Hound is a long, complex but coherent, almost Wordsworthian account of the growth of the poet's mind, which is interwoven with a biographical study, or poetic re-creation of the life and art of Camille Pissarro... beautifully written.' Vernon Scannell, Sunday Telegraph; 'Walcott explores the connections between the landscapes of childhood and those of art, he enters the mind of exile, unteases the presumptions of Empire...' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

A magnificent, semi-autobiographical sequence from a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro - a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to become a painter in Paris - and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover the detail of a painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Published with 25 full-colour reproductions of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed 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.