Tiepolo's Hound. - Review - book review

Tiepolo's Hound Derek Walcott Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2000, $30.00, ISBN 0-374-10587-1 New out in paperback

"Poetry", according to Derek Walcott's 1992 lecture to the Nobel Academy after having won its prestigious prize, "conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present." His latest book, Tiepolo's Hound, does just that. His previous book-length poem Omeros--which was followed by the collection of poems titled The Bounty--observed its characters through a history imbued with Homeric myth. Walcott's current book-length poem inhabits a continuum astride the poet's present and a chronology of the 19th century Impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro. Though Pissarro's history is rendered in the narrative past, it is subsumed into the poet's own experience, subject to his imagination and thus synchronized. As such, the poem examines firsthand and historically, personally and objectively, the complex responsibility of the artist to self and environment. Regarding Pissarro, Walcott asks rhetorically, "isn't his the old trial/of love faced with necessity, the same crisis every island artist ... must face in these barren paradises/where ... love becomes affliction?"

Born one hundred years apart, Pissarro and Walcott are products of the Caribbean. Pissarro was ultimately led by his intellectual and creative ambitions to Paris where he had a profound influence on the Impressionist movement. Walcott, having chosen to maintain residence in his birthplace of St. Lucia, juxtaposes candid presentations of his own inner life with Pissarro's venturesome tale, charming the two into a brilliant whole. Tiepolo's Hound displays Walcott's fascination with visual art and his fixation on a remembered detail in a painting to which the poem's title refers. As he searches to rediscover this detail that once inspired his imagination--that of a hound believed painted by the 18th century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo--we are led through Walcott's progression from artist to poet. The detail's elusiveness parallels the poet's frustration and self-perceived failure as a visual artist although the poem is illustrated by 26 of Walcott's own paintings. The poems' alternately rhyming couplets display Walcott's mastery of formal elements as he evokes literary tradition as effortlessly as kicking sand from his feet. In Tiepolo's Hound, Walcott not only determines to compensate for whatever skill he may believe his paintbrush lacked, but to articulate the burden of the individual talent as well.

Gregory A. Pardlo is completing an MFA at New York University and is a New York Times fellow in poetry. ******

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