Vinegar Hill

by Colm Tóibín

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807006535
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	1,158,136
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet. He is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has been short-listed 3 times for the Booker Prize and has won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the Costa Novel of the Year, the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Irish PEN Award for his contribution to Irish literature. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.

Table of Contents

September
In Los Angeles
Curves
Mysterium Lunae
The Long Trick
Two Grecos
Thunder All Night
From the Catalan
High Up
August
Anton Webern in Barcelona
Object on a Table
Orchard
Cush Gap, 2007
Morning
Open House
Blue Shutters
Shadows
The Marl Hole
The Nun
The Rosary
Vinegar Hill
Bishops
Kennedy in Wexford
Vatican II
Face
From the Air
The Torturer’s Art
American Poem
Life
Dublin: Saturday, 23 May, 2015
Gellert Baths, Spring 1990
Dead Cinemas
Variations on a Scene from Maeve Binchy
I Ran Away
The House
Two or Three
Emily Kngwarreye in Dublin
In Washington DC
In the White House
Late
November in America
Lines Written After the Second Moderna Vaccine at Dodgers’ Stadium Los Angeles, 27 February 2021
December
Two Plus One
In Memoriam
Ritual
Father & Son
In San Clemente
Eccles Street
Orpheus
Small Wonder
Canal Water
Tiepolo
Prayer to St Agnes
Eve
Arafat in Tunis
Jericho
Valentin’s Prayer
Pangur
Because the Night

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/18/2022

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A meditative probe into the language of ordinary days.”
—The New York Times

About the work of Colm Tóibín:

The Magician

“Tóibín’s novels typically depict an unfinished battle between those who know what they feel and those who don’t, between those who have found a taut peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled.”
—D. T. Max, The New Yorker

“The Magician recaptures a literary giant. . . . Symphonic and moving . . . Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Master:

“Tóibín’s work displays the kind of depth and sensitivity that few authors can offer. . . . The result is a beautiful, haunting portrayal.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“A quiet tour de force: a work of deep seriousness and sympathy that gives us a genius in his full human dimensions. . . . [This] profound novel is—dare one say it?—masterly.”
—The New York Observer

Brooklyn:

“Tóibín . . . [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”
—Floyd Skloot, The Los Angeles Times

“Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect. . . . Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Nora Webster:

“A high-wire act of an eighth novel . . . Tóibín’s radical restraint elevates what might have been a familiar tale of grief and survival into a realm of heightened inquiry. The result is a luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical.”
—Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

04/01/2022

Born in County Wexford, Ireland, Tóibín is a keen observer of Irish and gay life and has enjoyed an increasingly distinguished career as novelist; The Master, a portrait of Henry James, won the International Dublin Literary Award, while the Costa Book Award-winning Brooklyn sensitively negotiates the experience of a young Irish immigrant in 1950s New York. Like many novelists, Tóibín turns his hand to poetry as well, and this generous volume collects verse written over many years, with poems addressing distant places, politics, sexuality, and memory. Tóibín's sense of enjambment is not always smooth, and some of the poems engage experience without the last refinements that would render them more than memoir or journal page, but his verse is always articulate and convincing. Tóibín is at his finest in the poems that approach epigram, as in "Curves" ("Within the body is its own sweet sound/ It starts as echo and fades fast") and "Anton Webern in Barcelona." VERDICT A novelist's poetry is, with a very few exceptions, a pleasure for the completist, but in this collection Tóibín supplies poems that should interest readers beyond his usual audience.—Graham Christian

Library Journal