A poet's pictures

Walcott's lifelong interest in painting comes into focus in his latest book, an exquisitely produced volume containing a long…

Walcott's lifelong interest in painting comes into focus in his latest book, an exquisitely produced volume containing a long poem with many interleaved reproductions of his own Caribbean landscapes. At the poem's centre is an account of the career of Camille Pissarro, who left the Caribbean island of St Thomas to seek his fortune as an impressionist painter in Paris. Alongside this uphill struggle "for a Danish colonial Jew /from a dirty backward island to enter /the museum's bronzed doors", we have the poet's struggle to make sense of a detail of a hound from a painting by Tiepolo or Veronese. The poet goes on an art-historical quest to Venice in search of this image from the art books of his childhood, but in the end gives up the scholar's task. The hound, an emblem of the commonplace in all art, resolves itself eventually into "A starved pup trembling by the hard sea" in the native Caribbean.

This shifting tone-poem is pitched in a key lower than the best of Walcott's work, partly because it explores a feeling of unfulfilment in his career as a painter. Paradoxically, it was the pictures I found more satisfying here. With their redolence of the balmy, luxuriant West Indies, they are a delight to savour on a dark winter's evening - for those of us who haven't booked up for the Caribbean this New Year.

Sean Lysaght is a poet and critic. He lectures at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in Castlebar