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.
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He is the author of ten novels, including The Master, Brooklyn and The Magician, and two collections of stories. He has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize and has won the Costa Novel of the Year and the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year. He is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Chancellor of Liverpool University. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize. He lives in Dublin.
Winner, 2021 The David Cohen Prize for Literature
* Highly anticipated first collection of poetry from award-winning Irish novelist and broadcaster Colm Tóibín * Collection named after the site of a battle between Irish rebels and British forces in 1798 near the author’s native Enniscorthy, County Wexford * Subjects include Dublin, life and death in pandemic times and gay marriage rights * Many poems were written during Tóibín’s cancer treatment, when steroids affected his energy levels and concentration * Wexford and Los Angeles, Spain and, most of all, Dublin, where he has lived for most of his adult life, emerge vividly and memorably * WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2021
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
A renowned novelist, Tóibín brings his keen eye for vivid narrative detail... There is a lingering melancholy in Tóibíns work, particularly in his sparse reflections on ageing and death... Vinegar Hill offers the pleasure of a slow, meandering walk, as if the reader and poet have companionably "decid[ed] to take / The slow way home". Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian
