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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.
“If sound could have a texture, Tóibín's voice would be velvet. In this audiobook, his first published collection of poetry, Tóibín's delivery is rich, luxuriant. The poems are wide ranging in both topic and tone, but his voice remains consistently deep and gentle, with a lovely Irish accent that adds musicality.”—AudioFile
“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