Between me and Venice the thigh of a hound;

my awe of the ordinary, because even as I write,

paused on a step of this couplet, I have never found

its image again, a hound in astounding light.

Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille

Pissarro, born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation

as a painter in Paris. The poe himself hunts for 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 of Derek Walcott's own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-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.