Tiepolo's Hound

Tiepolo's Hound

by Derek Walcott

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2000, $30.00, ISBN 0-374-1058-1

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 booklength poem inhabits a continuum astride the poet's present and a chronology of the 19th century Impressionist painter, …