Tiepolo's Hound

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Awe of the Ordinary: A Poet Sings of Paint

The power of paint -- color, texture, and brushstroke -- is depicted with absolute awe in Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott's masterful book-length poem Tiepolo's Hound. Walcott weaves together the biography of painter Camille Pissarro, often referred to as the father of Impressionism, with his own life story as a young poet and painter. Pissarro, like Walcott, was born in the Caribbean islands. As a young man, Pissarro left for Paris, where he influenced Cézanne and mentored many painters. Walcott, who has lived around the world, now splits his time between his native St. Lucia and the United States.

This is a poem about falling in love with art, and numerous gods of painting, such as Tiepolo, Veronese, and Cézanne, are referred to. But that's just the beginning. Colonialism, the Dreyfus affair, and the pain of exile keep popping up, giving the poem a broader historical context. Wide range is a typical feature for Walcott, an acclaimed playwright, director, and teacher who believes poets should try their hand at other projects besides just verse. His individual poems span continents and eras, and his trademark lush lines are anything but minimal.

Here, the interlocked couplets maintained throughout the poem add an extra depth to the lines and provide an overarching structure. In addition, the 25 watercolors reproduced here show Walcott's work as a committed painter and serve as a testament to his view of the importance, for poets, of stretching beyond strict verse.

—Aviya Kushner

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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 Cahners Business Information.|

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.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Adam Kirsch

Walcott's poetry is his true testament, the record of his victorious struggle with language and history, and the epigraph to that testament can be taken from Walcott himself: "It is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes."
—Times Literary Supplement

Fred D'Aguiar

A septugenarian at the height of his poetic powers, Derek Walcott confirms in Tiepolo's Hounds that his famous derone is the finest tuned instrument in English on the world poetry scene...The book is arguably the publishing industry's most beautiful product this year, and trimphantly tactile in an age of Internet everything. Included in the book are twently watercolors by Walcott.
—Times Literary Supplement

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, the prolific Walcott has also won the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the Guinness Award for Poetry, and a Royal Society of Literature Award, among many other honors. He was the recipient of a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation and is an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. A native of St. Lucia, West Indies, he continues to make his home there, and teaches at Boston University during the academic year. He is the founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop. The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Negro Ensemble Company have produced his plays, one of which won an Obie Award. He has published nearly 20 books of poetry and co-authored, with Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, a collection of essays honoring Robert Frost. The present volume, a book-length narrative poem composed entirely of couplets, follows the interwoven journeys of Walcott himself and fellow Caribbean Camille Pissaro, an artist who left the islands in the latter half of the 19th century to study painting in France. Their voyages are studies in impressionism, when `all was paint and the light in paint.` Even when he has set aside the artist's brush and taken up the poet's pen, Walcott can `still smell linseed oil in the wild views of villages.` And in presenting the biographical details of Pissaro's life, he gives us their essence, not merely the `walled facts.` Walcott has the ability to reconcile European and island influences in a way that is enriching to both cultures. An artist himself, his painterly techniques are brought to bear in this masterful, lavish, and detailed work.