Vinegar Hill

Novelist Tóibín (The Magician) delivers a sparkling debut collection shaped by mist and nostalgia, and rendered with precise imagery and dark humor. The opener, "September," closes, " 'Someone told me you were dead.' " Both his short and extended poems include reportage ("Dublin: Saturday, May 23, 2015" takes place on the day same-sex marriage is voted in), a fascination with the small details in paintings (in "Small Wonder," a glass bowl in Veronese's "Annunciation" is "close to not being there") and bleak weather that seems as much internal as external (in "The Marl Hole" the dark is "like the night air itself,/ Released from the prison of outside,/ Tender, persistent, nosing around"). In "Eve," Tóibín's gifts as a novelist shine through as Eve is seen looking back at God and her time in the garden, "when the night sky/ Hardens over us." Would Eve like to return to paradise again? "No, but I would like yesterday to come/ Again, wash itself over us,/ Fondle us with its shredded beauty." These exact and lyrical poems are full of striking moments that will reward fans of Tóibín's fiction and garner new admirers. (Apr.)

Born in County Wexford, Ireland, Tóibín is a keen observer of Irish and gay life and has enjoyed an increasingly distinguished career as novelist; The Master, a portrait of Henry James, won the International Dublin Literary Award, while the Costa Book Award-winning Brooklyn sensitively negotiates the experience of a young Irish immigrant in 1950s New York. Like many novelists, Tóibín turns his hand to poetry as well, and this generous volume collects verse written over many years, with poems addressing distant places, politics, sexuality, and memory. Tóibín's sense of enjambment is not always smooth, and some of the poems engage experience without the last refinements that would render them more than memoir or journal page, but his verse is always articulate and convincing. Tóibín is at his finest in the poems that approach epigram, as in "Curves" ("Within the body is its own sweet sound/ It starts as echo and fades fast") and "Anton Webern in Barcelona." VERDICT A novelist's poetry is, with a very few exceptions, a pleasure for the completist, but in this collection Tóibín supplies poems that should interest readers beyond his usual audience.--Graham Christian