Tiepolo's hound

the long version

"Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris, while the poet himself longs to rediscover 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 full-color 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."--BOOK JACKET.