Tiepolo's Hound [Paperback]

Derek Walcott (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374527792 | ISBN-13: 978-0374527792 | Publication Date: May 15, 2001 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After writing the Odyssey of his native St. Lucia with Omeros (1990), the epic poem that helped earn him the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott has increasingly sought to sensualize the Caribbean landscape within the competing contexts of colonialism, history and Western artistc traditions. The dual narrative of his latest book-length poem looks at these inheritances by intertwining the career of impressionist Camille Pissarro, who was a Sephardic Jew from St. Thomas, with the poet's own quest to revisit a Venetian painting, of a hound, he once saw in New York. As a painter himself, Walcott associates his narrator's artistic island origins with Pissarro's in smooth, masterful couplets: "I still smell linseed oil in the wild views/ Of villages and the tang of turpentine... Salt wind encouraged us, and the surf's white noise." As the poet makes his way toward Venice and "Tiepolo's Hound," his journey mirrors Pissarro's transition from St. Thomas to Europe. Place names serve as the poem's focal points, forming an extended near-sestina: the names Pontoise; Paris; the Seine; St Thomas's Dronningens Street and Charlotte Amalie; and the ubiquitous "Tiepolo's ceiling" appear again and again. While the repetitions give a powerful sense of cultural geography, Walcott is not committed to giving us his characters's whole story, but rather a sort of embellished art-history-in-verse, as he imagines Pissarro in Paris, or how Pissarro would have painted slaves, "the umber and ebony of their skin." The narrator's eventual reunion with the painting thus proves something of an anti-climax, as he hasn't generated enough psychological tension to sustain an epic. Still, Walcott's majestic linguistic vistas will be more than enough to carry readers through gorgeously imagined encounters with painters, painting and the visual nostalgia of the exile. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

By now, it is well established that 1992 Nobel prize winner Walcott has at two modes: the lyric, ambiguous with painfully self-contradictory messages about art and history, and the narrative, which is necessarily less self-embraided and more direct. This is a new book-length rhymed narrative poem, a kind of successor to Walcott's Omeros of 1992. Storytelling in poetry is very difficult, especially when, as here, there are two interwoven stories to be told, that of Camille Pissaro and of the poet himself, both natives of the Caribbean; it is very difficult for the reader not to be caught and held by the musicality of lines such as "The backfiring engine of the vaporetto/ scumbled the reflection of her palaces,// the wake braided its hair; now I would get/ the roaring feast with its fork-beaded faces." Walcott's long artistic voyage is superbly written, though it does not contain the surprises and self-contained pleasures of his shorter poems. For most collections.DGraham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374527792
• ISBN-13: 978-0374527792
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,283,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Coffee-table poetry and art", May 12, 2000

By 

Lee, John Robert (Castries, Saint Lucia, West Indies (Eastern Caribbean)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tiepolo's Hound (Hardcover)

Derek Walcott has always confessed his ambitions to be a painter of note.While poetry became his favourite wife, his love for painting never disappeared. Over the years he has continued to paint, and his art now decorates the covers of his poetry collections. "Tiepolo's Hound" seems one of the least personal of Walcott's books. While we get glimpses of the poet's life, he is more concerned to explore the life of Camille Pisarro to understand the heart of the individual bound to the calling of artist. It seems a tentative, searching exploration.Obviously identifying with their common Caribbean childhood and the influences of landscape and history they share, Walcott tries to see into the complex struggles of this artist who left the Caribbean for Paris, to become one of the fathers of impressionism.Seeking his epiphanic hound,he shares with us the painters who excited his artistic inspiration. Alongside his rhyming couplets he has placed twenty six of his own paintings-some very good, others less so.It is rare to find a book like this, coffetable poetry and art together by the same artist. Now seventy, this Nobel Laureate is not afraid to share his meditations on art and poetry-through art and poetry-warts and all.A collector's item.Walcott's readers must be patient with him, and try to go with him as he charts, quite bravely,his questionings of the artist's commitment and the cost."Whatever the age is, it lies in the small spring of poetry everywhere"(p66).A defining comment.Read "poetry" as the very heart of all art.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tiepolo's Hound, December 26, 2005

By 

Unhegel "wisdomlacker" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tiepolo's Hound (Hardcover)

With so many wondrous works, it is tempting to take Walcott's poetic virtuosity for granted. Of them all, this is my favorite, and this one features his virtuosity at its most shining. His effortlessly rhyming couplets sing themes of painting and poetry, biography and myth, existential pain and release,geography and spirit. And Pissarro the painter is duly celebrated.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Painting, April 25, 2008

By 

Michael Fong "Michael" (Michael) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tiepolo's Hound (Hardcover)

For reference, the white hound may be the one found in "Finding the Moses" by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. See also youtube's "Tiepolo's Hound: A Reading by Derek Walcott".