Word: walcott
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...your way." Still, tragic events like the Diallo killing--along with alarming scandals like the reported abuses in the Los Angeles police department--have made the words of caution more urgent. "Many people felt that Mr. Diallo could have been any one of us," says Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League and the father of a 15-year...
...minor curiosity of art history: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), a leading French Impressionist painter, friend and mentor to Cezanne and Gauguin, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. An item of literary history: Derek Walcott (1930- ), who would grow up to win the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia...
What these two isolated facts have to do with each other is made resplendently luminous in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 164 pages; $30), a long narrative poem with a number of stories on its mind. One is what Walcott modestly calls his "inexact and blurred biography" of the painter Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were driven out of Portugal, who chose to practice his art in Europe rather than the raw island paradise of his birth. A parallel account involves Walcott: his boyhood fascination with the reproductions of European masterpieces he found in books...
This detail initially strikes Walcott as a mystical confirmation of the transcendent powers of art, its superiority to the transiency of life. How frustrating, then, that as he grows older, the poet cannot again find the white wolfhound where he was sure he saw it in Veronese (or maybe Giambattista Tiepolo). How puzzling that his imagination keeps calling up a picture of a black mongrel scavenging along the wharf of a Caribbean harbor town...
...example, Walcott portrays Pissarro's choice--to abandon St. Thomas for France and high European culture--in different ways. At one point the poet gives his blessing: "There was no treachery if he turned his back/on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds/of the feathery immortelles, on a dirt track/with a horse cart for an equestrian bronze." But later Walcott wonders whether Pissarro's Impressionist renderings of French scenery did not involve treachery after all: "Are all the paintings then falsifications/of his real origins, was his island betrayed?/Instead of linden walks and railway stations,/ our palms and windmills...