Daniel Tobin

"…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 feel darkness 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

In these lucid and lyrical translations of Celan's poetry by Daniel Tobin, we are reminded that for Celan, "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language."

From Nothing, a book-length poem in sections, explores the conflicted and exemplary life of Belgian physicist and priest, Georges Lemaître, known as "the father of the Big Bang," and his life's profound implications, through what John Barth called the principle of metaphoric means: "the writer's investiture in as many aspects of the text as possible with emblematic significance." Though associative and multivalent in its orchestration, From Nothing weaves its frequencies into a resonant whole.

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

The title Blood Labors is a double entendre: labors as both the thing and the action. Split into four sections, which act as musical movements more than section breaks, there are poems about space and matter, the human impulse to create, and the artist's work.

Unified by its theme of metamorphosis, these poems descend deeply into subjects as divergent as a jetty that disappears during high tide, to a talking parasitical head, to a sandlot baseball legend, to a famine road in Ireland, to Orpheus, to Wittgenstein, to a murdered poet and his wife, and finally to grave personal loss, tracing through all of its many attentions the thread that binds the physical to the metaphysical—a psychic passage from death back to life again.

“Daniel Tobin’s new book of poems takes its title and form from the literal structure that dominates the poet’s childhood landscape, the 'gleaming bridge built in our lifetime,' the Verrazano-Narrows in Brooklyn... Tobin has achieved a work of dense complexity that lacks neither technical mastery nor emotional depth... sublime... magnificent” —The Harvard Review

Awards and recognition:
Featured book on Poetry Daily
Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book Award

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. The voice in Double Life is unmistakably contemporary—earnest and responsive, wary and hardened. Through language lush with meaning, imagery, and high-energy prosodic effects, Tobin deepens and extends the harrowing awareness of mortality, history, and the quest for transcendence that so deeply marked his award-winning first book of poems.

These poems reveal a quest for transcendence with a strong theological impulse, though without appeal to dogma. Centered in the world of human relationships, particularly childhood and family, Daniel Tobin's poems exhibit both lyric and narrative intensity, and are distinguished by their descriptive clarity, formal dexterity, and musical complexity.

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 Transcendence.

"...Daniel Tobin has come to the rescue by editing this elightened edition of Lola Ridge's affecting, wonderfully accessible poems." —Anne Stevenson

"Daniel Tobin's Awake in America speaks for generations of Irish Americans. This incisive and moving critique of poetry and tradition pushes the frontiers of Irish Studies, limning Irish American culture through its poets—O'Reilly, Ridge, Moore, Stevens, Coffey, Bogan, McGrath, Liddy, Montague, Wall, Grennan, Delanty, Agee, Donaghy, Tobin himself, and many others. Awake in America trumps the many facile takes on Irish America, revealing its cultural poetics of self-exclusion, solidarity politics, linguistic hybridity, and indelible (be)longings. Tobin's insights will challenge scholars and readers to survey a new country of Irishness, at once inner, ardent, and textual. Tobin—with this book, his poetry, and his massive Book of Irish American Poetry—is pressing Irish Studies to see the American cousins at the table." —Joseph Lennon, author of Irish Orientalism and Fell Hunger

Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's entire body of work (including his recent volumes, 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.

The Book of Irish American Poetry draws together the best and the most representative poetry by Irish Americans and about Irish America that has been written over the past three hundred years. The anthology was selected as an "Outstanding" title for 2008 by the University Press Books Committee, American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association.