Tiepolo's Hound

Limited first edition. Sm. 4to. Pp. [viii], 163, [1]. Dark green cloth, stamped in gilt, over cream paper-covered boards; grey-blue endpapers. No. 81 of a limited edition of 110 specially bound copies, signed by Walcott to the colophon. Illustrated with 26 full-colour reproductions of the author's watercolour paintings. As new, in acetate wrapper.

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