Tiepolo's Hound

First edition. Sm. 4to. Pp. [viii], 163, [1]. White textured paper-covered boards stamped in black to spine, with author's initials to front underlined by a brushstroke. Illustrated dustwrapper, priced $30.00 to front flap. Further illustrated with 26 full-colour reproductions of the author's own watercolour paintings, in an homage to Camille Pissarro.

A long narrative poem, composed entirely in couplets, Tiepolo's Hound joins the quests of two Caribbeans: Camille Pissarro, who leaves his native St Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris, and the poet himself longing to rediscover a detail – "a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound" – from a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit to New York. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. "A beautiful book and a gorgeous poem... one of the finest recent examples of the epic form." –Justin D. Coffin, The Philadelphia Inquirer