Description
Book SynopsisIn this latest collection of poems, Hill invokes people and place, mythologizing and demythologizing city lives as they are led. From poignant vignettes and celebrations to urban-pastoral and elegy, these poems extend Hill’s romance with London’s psychic and surreal fabric. Selected as a Next Generation poet, Hill continues to delight us with sensuous observation and imaginative embrace.
“The closeup detail taken directly from nature, then skewed through 90° to give the reader something completely new, even unique ... with this third collection, Hill promises to be a real force in poetry, displaying an utterly contemporary understanding of how nature continues to work.”
– Poetry Review
“There is a fin de siècle decadence about them ... not least in their brightly coloured diction, their luxuriant descriptiveness, their louche postures.”
– Poetry Wales
“Superb conjurations of place.”
– Adam Mars Jones
“Compassionate and intelligent ... so full of action and interest and that brings alive such an array of people and places, that it is difficult to believe they sprang from the pen of one writer.”
– Rachel Cusk
Trade ReviewIn careful rhythms, the 21 poems of this British poet's fourth collection describe the “collision” of opposites that Londoners and other city dwellers live with daily: e.g., the city’s smell of “Peking duck and piss.” Repo-men and aging chess players, pigeons and Chinese supermarkets, sidewalk preachers and railway station bars all populate these neat stanzas.
* Publishers Weekly *
What Hill reveals to us in this vital, luminous collection is that 200 years later, collision is still the city's essential state. In a book-length love song to the fabulousness and ragged beauty of his native London, he considers the city through the lattice of physical and metaphorical dialectics – nature and manufacture, wealth and poverty, glamour and grime – that bring it to life. [...] It is rare to come across a collection of poetry that you know with certainty you will still be reading years from now, but for me, this is such a book.
-- Sarah Crown * The Guardian *
Salt has a real winner in Tobias Hill’s Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow . . . of your preference is for a poetry you share in, enter into imaginatively, then Hill is your man . . . bringing London to life sensuously, giving it a real cosmopolitan lived-in feel.
-- Matt Simpson * Stride Magazine *
Tobias Hill’s new collection announces its arrival as one such London-loving book from the first poem, written in a historical fiction genre. You can't help cheering the lust for life. [...] in one striking poem, ‘Repossession’, there's a marrying of storytelling (or backstory telling) with Hill’s engaging conversational style. Surprisingly I think of Edward Thomas here. Like several of Thomas’s poems, this is a text about depopulation and the casual, almost intimate rhythm, is especially effective.
-- Richard Price * The Scotsman *
Table of Contents
- From the Diaries of Henry Morgan, Summer 1653
- Repossession
- To a Boy on the Underground
- A Year in London
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July
- August
- September
- October
- November
- December
- TV Dinner
- Synthesis
- Gravity
- The Gifts
- The Nightworkers
- The Orator
- Amphibians
- The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat
- Five Ways of Looking at my Grandfather
- The Woman Who Likes Standing Under Trees in the Rain
- Nine in the Morning in the Station Bar
- Yellow
- A Bowl of Green Fruit
- The Wave
- Horse Chestnuts
- Summer Late Night Opening
- Nocturne
