Derek Walcott Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jim Hannan

Critical Review by Jim Hannan

SOURCE: Hannan, Jim. Review of Tiepolo's Hound, by Derek Walcott. World Literature Today 74, no. 4 (autumn 2000): 797–98.

In the following positive review, Hannan praises Tiepolo's Hound, complimenting Walcott's “calm and devastating clarity.”

Derek Walcott's long poem on the congruence between art, art history, and the state of one's soul abounds with his singular ability to combine passion with elegance, historical rumination with arresting images, and social consciousness with minute observations of texture, sound, and color. Walcott revisits themes from his previous poetry, including exchanges between Europe and the Caribbean, the power inherent in language and naming, the artist as exile, and the role of culture in contemporary life. Like much of his poetry, this poem excels when craft and vision coalesce with resonant exactitude, as when Walcott describes the painter Camille Pissarro's desire to leave the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where his family had settled from Europe:...
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