Daniel Tobin

Pimone Triplett

An indispensable resource for anyone interested in the art and craft of contemporary poetry

Essays on the Practice and the Art

Poet's Work, Poet's Play

Coming of age in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge, these poems explore what it is to be an Irish American Catholic; a dutiful son of hard drinking, sometimes hilarious and sometimes tragic parents; a son of Brooklyn; and, too, deeply rooted to the country of his ancestors, Ireland. Dark, funny, and sometimes troubling, these poems, always accessible, track a life well lived and felt.

Poems

The Narrows

Awake in America seeks to establish a conversation between Irish and Irish American literature that challenges many of the long-accepted boundaries between the two.

On Irish American Poetry

Awake in America

In the Harvard Review, critic Christopher Bock writes that “…Four Way Books is known for taking risks with aesthetically challenging and important work, and Tobin seems more ambitious than many of his contemporaries….” Second Things is Daniel Tobin’s fourth book of poems, and his second collection with Four Way Books, with a third forthcoming in 2010. Following 2005’s The Narrows, which traces an Irish-American boy-to-manhood in lush poems reminiscent of both Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, Second Things evinces a tone that is wholly new.

Second Things

An exploration of the life of Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, known as "the father of the Big Bang"

From Nothing

A collection that explores spaces in order to probe the fraught interplay of matter and spirit, desire and monstrosity, the created and the uncreated

Blood Labors

Daniel Tobin's stunning new collection, Double Life, takes its name from a vision of humanity at once passionately earthbound and spurred by the metaphysical. These poems range from haunting meditations on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch to an astonishing polyphonic sequence based on the life of Father Bartolomeo de Las Casas, who died in 1566 and wrote the first bill of rights in the New World. Between these two longer orchestrations appear works both musically diverse and startling in their formal virtuosity, as attuned to Plato, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, and the natural world as to TV talks shows, the news, physics, movies, and fast-food restaurants. From the persona of an Irish-Catholic Brooklyn youth on a school trip to Spain to that of a grown man of the suburbs "hollowed by doubt... / it's only the observance / of words I keep now to stay the soul," Tobin shows us the search for a way to encompass the world, turning Christian motifs toward new meanings.

Double Life

A spiritual journey beginning in memory, its music the song of one who would come through.

Where the World is Made

Karen Lindsey

Joanne Hilden

Critically ill and unlikely to survive. A recent Harvard University study on pediatric end-of-life care has shown that the medical community is failing such children and their families. Indeed, in their effort to be ever-hopeful and cure-oriented in the face of a child's terminal illness, they neglect to advise parents on the basics of emotional support for all family members, pediatric pain medication, and the need for making plans and worst-case preparations. Based on the National Advanced Illness Coordinated Care program and the stories and advice gleaned from co-author Joanne Hilden's years of work as a pediatric oncologist, Shelter from the Storm fills this advice-and-caregiving void. A compassionate road map to what the family may have to face, what they may be asked to decide, and how they might want to involve their child in the decision-making, Shelter from the Storm will help parents and caregivers make informed, loving, and protective choices on behalf of their children in the most trying of times.

Caring For A Child With A Life-threatening Condition

Shelter From The Storm

Lola Ridge

Poetry. Edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. LIGHT IN HAND offers selections from Ridge's first three volumes of poetry that have entered the public domain: The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag. The poems in this volume showcase Ridge's critical yet compassionate eye for the world around her, from the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side to the bloody frontlines of World War I. Rich with finely-drawn details of person and place, Ridge's poems marry a materialist political sensibility with a deep spiritual belief in the ability of humankind to transcend the world's havoc and strife. As Ridge writes in "Obliteration" of "The emptily effacing air, / That has closed upon so many cries./ Yet holds in its blue vacuum/ No bleached white evidence," it is often the work of history to bury the cries of the oppressed, as well as those who try to speak out against injustice. It was Ridge's lifelong mission to counteract this erasure and illuminate that evidence

Selected Early Poems

Light in Hand

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's body of work up to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of "the center," a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Passage to the Center

Presents an anthology of Irish American poetry. This book collects the work of over two hundred Irish American poets, as well as other American poets whose work enjoins Irish American themes. It begins with poetry of the "populist period", and moves to the work of Irish Americans who have made an indelible imprint on American poetry.

Daniel Tobin

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