Description Hide Description- Show Description+
From the highly acclaimed author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibíns first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion and belonging through a modern lens.
Fans of Colm Tóibíns 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, memory and a fading past, and facing mortality.
The poems reflect a life well-travelled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Tóibíns unique lens.
Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion and humour, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder and cherish.
Author: Colm Toibin
Paperback Published 2 August 2022 128 pages
"The hallmark of this quite assured and at times deeply-affecting volume, is a soft-souled probing of the lived and the felt, in ways that amplify the ordinary into art...Tóibín writes with immense and at times expansive clarity, but in doing so, is able to trigger multiform responses in his reader. A weathered, well-toured life emerges, all of its complexity and depth made redolent by a sure-footed lucidity. In Vinegar Hill Tóibín, now past middle-age, deploys a sustained vision by which the passing of things is relished, and made to go."- Omar Sabbagh, The High Window
"Tóibíns sense of narrative momentum is well served, and without constraint...Vinegar Hill is a moving, learned and profoundly wise collection."-Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times