Tiepolo's Hound

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.