SOURCE: Alvarez, A. “Visions of Light.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 8 (11 May 2000): 27–28.

In the following review, Alvarez offers a positive assessment of Tiepolo's Hound.

When Derek Walcott's first book of poems was published in London in 1962, it came with the blessing of Robert Graves, one of the twentieth century's finest and most underrated poets, and a title from Andrew Marvell—In a Green Night. The title was a muted gesture toward Modernism, since T. S. Eliot had been the major force behind the rediscovery of Marvell after two and a half centuries of neglect. But Eliot had cosmopolitan tastes and initially he had been drawn to the Metaphysical poets because they reminded him of Laforgue and Corbière.

Graves, on the other hand, was linked to Marvell as though by natural right, as direct inheritor of a peculiarly English lyric tradition: classical, witty, idiosyncratic, pure. It was...