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.
“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
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
- “20 new paperbacks hitting shelves this April,” Literary Hub, included in paperback reading roundup
- “Mortality, politics, and the power of poetry in Colm Tóibín’s Vinegar Hill,” NPR’s Book of the Day, podcast
- “Colm Tóibín’s Debut Poetry Collection Vinegar Hill,” All of It With Alison Stewart, interview
- “Revisiting the Past: Colm Tóibín, Interviewed by Jazz Boothby,” New York Review of Books, interview
- “Irish poet and novelist Colm Toibin reads from his new poetry book Vinegar Hill,” Weekend Edition Saturday/NPR, interview
- “Mysterium Lunae: A Poem for Sunday,” The Atlantic, excerpt
- “An Interview with Colm Tóibín,” Academy of American Poets/POETS.org, Q&A
- “A Zoom of One's Own: Poetry 2022,” Publishers Weekly, contributor to upcoming poetry roundtable piece
- “Interview with an Indie Press: Beacon Press,” Literary Hub, book mentioned in Q&A with the press
- “Best books coming out in 2022 — what you might be reading in this new year,” Sunday Times, book included in 2022 book roundup
- “2022 in books: highlights for the year ahead,” The Guardian, book included in 2022 book roundup