Vinegar Hill
Poems
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
From the New York Times best-selling author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion, and belonging through a modern lens
Fans of Colm Tóibín’s novels, including The Magician, The Master, and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a wide range of subjects—politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-traveled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Tóibín’s unique lens.
Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion, and humor, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder, and cherish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Tóibín (The Magician) delivers a sparkling debut collection shaped by mist and nostalgia, and rendered with precise imagery and dark humor. The opener, "September," closes, " 'Someone told me you were dead.' " Both his short and extended poems include reportage ("Dublin: Saturday, May 23, 2015" takes place on the day same-sex marriage is voted in), a fascination with the small details in paintings (in "Small Wonder," a glass bowl in Veronese's "Annunciation" is "close to not being there") and bleak weather that seems as much internal as external (in "The Marl Hole" the dark is "like the night air itself,/ Released from the prison of outside,/ Tender, persistent, nosing around"). In "Eve," Tóibín's gifts as a novelist shine through as Eve is seen looking back at God and her time in the garden, "when the night sky/ Hardens over us." Would Eve like to return to paradise again? "No, but I would like yesterday to come/ Again, wash itself over us,/ Fondle us with its shredded beauty." These exact and lyrical poems are full of striking moments that will reward fans of Tóibín's fiction and garner new admirers.
