Tiepolo's Hound

"Tiepolo's Hound" joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pisarro, who leaves his native St Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris; and the poet himself, longing to rediscover a detail from a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit to New York. 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. 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.