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Tiepolo's Hound
 
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Tiepolo's Hound [Hardcover]

Derek Walcott (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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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.

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.
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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.
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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (3 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 - Published on Amazon.com
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, Dec 26 2005
By Unhegel "wisdomlacker" - Published on Amazon.com
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" - Published on Amazon.com
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".
› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  5.0 out of 5 stars 
 
 
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