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Vinegar Hill

Colm Toibin

Cover of Vinegar Hill by Colm Toibin
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, Bestsellers, First Collections, Irish, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (144 pages)
(Pub. Mar 2022)
9781800171619
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Mar 2022)
9781800171626
£10.39 £9.35
Audiobook (MP3 format) 1 h 45 m
(Pub. Mar 2022)
9781800172982
£14.99 £13.49
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2021

    From the highly acclaimed 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, memory and a fading past, and facing mortality.

    The poems reflect a life well-travelled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, 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 humour, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder and cherish.
    Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He is the author of ten novels, including The Master, Brooklyn and The Magician, and two collections of stories. He has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize and has won the Costa Novel of the Year and ... read more
    Awards won by Colm Toibin Winner, 2021 The David Cohen Prize for Literature
    'There are pleasures to be had here.' 

    Stephen Romer, Literary Review  

    'The hallmark of this quite assured and at times deeply-affecting volume, is a soft-souled probing of the lived and the felt, in ways that amplify the ordinary into art...Tóibín writes with immense and at times expansive clarity, but in doing so, is able to trigger multiform responses in his reader.  A weathered, well-toured life emerges, all of its complexity and depth made redolent by a sure-footed lucidity.  In Vinegar Hill Tóibín, now past middle-age, deploys a sustained vision by which the passing of things is relished, and made to go.'

     Omar Sabbagh, The High Window

    'Tóibín's sense of narrative momentum is well served, and without constraint...Vinegar Hill is a moving, learned and profoundly wise collection.'

    Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
    'A renowned novelist, Tóibín brings his keen eye for vivid narrative detail... There is a lingering melancholy in Tóibín's work, particularly in his sparse reflections on ageing and death... Vinegar Hill offers the pleasure of a slow, meandering walk, as if the reader and poet have companionably "decid[ed] to take / The slow way home".'

    Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian

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