Daniel Tobin

The Mansions

"…Daniel Tobin's The Mansions is nothing less than a wonder. In its compendious learning, its
consummate artistry, and its spiritual wisdom, this poem inspires genuine awe, and it challenges
the reader to think more broadly and more acutely, to feel more profoundly, and to live life more
attentively. In these days, as so many of us feeldarkness growing all around us, Tobin's poem
may serve us as a guide and lead us to a place where we're able riveder le stelle, "to see again the
stars…"

Ryan Wilson, from The Preface

Selected Works

Blood Labors

"Blood Labors is an ebullient and ecclesiastical wonder, capturing more of creation, the uncreated, the recreated than any dozen books on a poetry shelf.... All told, Blood Labors dazzles with its brilliance.

The Stone in the Air

"In Tobin's able and reverent hands, Celan's work is given a new charge for our own times... moving, splendid, and a gifted work of translation." --Eamonn Wall

From Nothing

This is a memorable, tragic, and moving book that should be read by everyone who wonders how we got here and what our being here can mean." — Alan Shapiro

Poetry

The Net

“These are very beautiful poems, and The Net is a very beautiful book—surpassingly so. The mastery evident
in his uses of these resources is enviable.”—David Ferry

Belated Heavens

“Tobin's graceful movement between what's lost and the here-and-now, between earthy popular culture and metaphysical concerns is characteristic of…. a poet fast becoming one of his generation's finest.” —Ned Balbo, The Antioch Review

Criticism

Awake in America

"These essays usefully identify a tradition of twentieth-century Atlantic Irish writing in both Irish literature and American. Tobin's commentaries will appeal both to the general reader . . . of poetry and to the academic reader who has an interest in American literature, Irish studies, and the conundra of hyphenate or hybrid subcultures. Tobin has already established the canon of poetry in that literature with The Book of Irish American Poetry. Awake in America promises to be a useful and popular companion to that book." —Thomas Dillon Redshaw, University of St. Thomas

Poetry Anthology

The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present

“...a prodigious and remarkable work of literary scholarship.” —Eamonn Wall

To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge

"Radical, modernist, fier, glmamourous, feminist--adjectives and categories can only gesture toward the enduringly significant life and works of the poet Lola Ridge" Robert Pinsky

Essays

ON SERIOUS EARTH

Celebrated poet Daniel Tobin takes on the largest questions of the meaning and durability of language to art in his new book, On Serious Earth: Poetry and Tanscendence.

Presses

Four Way Books

Orison Books

Salmon Publishing

Little Island

University of Notre Dame Press

University of Michigan Press

Louisiana State University Press

University Press of Kentucky

University Press of New England

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Authors Guild

Home

Biography

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016), Blood Labors (Four Way Books, 2018), and The Mansions, as well as The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan (Salmon Poetry, 2018). Among his awards are the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, the Stephen J. Meringoff Award in Poetry, and creative writing fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Blood Labors was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Washington Independent Review of Books. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book Award. His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada), and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. On Serious Earth, his most recent book of essays, appeared from Orison Books in 2019. His book of essays, Awake in America, appeared from the University of Notre Dame Press in 2011. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), (with Pimone Triplett) Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007), and To The Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge, which received a Special Commendation from the Poetry Society (UK). His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.