Tiepolo's Hound

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

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.

Reviews

'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

Author Bio

Derek Walcott was born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930. The author of many plays and books of poetry, he was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He now divides his time between homes in St Lucia and New York.