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Biographical note: Poet and novelist Tobias Hill was born in London, England, on 30 March 1970. He read English at Sussex University and spent two years teaching in Japan. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Year of the Dog (1995); Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), influenced by his experiences living in Japan; and Zoo (1998), which coincided with his tenure as Poet in Residence at London Zoo as part of the Poetry Places scheme administered by the Poetry Society. He is also the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Skin (1997), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714124
ISBN: 9781844714124
Author: Tobias Hill
Title: Midnight in the City of Clocks
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Sep-07
Extent: 80pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight: 120 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 12.99
Price: USD 23.95
Rights: World
See also
Tobias
Hill
Nocturne
in Chrome & Sunset
Yellow
Tobias
Hill
Year of the Dog
Tobias
Hill
Zoo
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Short
description/annotation: This lively second collection from a young, much-travelled writer falls into two parts. ‘Transit’ includes poems of travel and transport, especially Japan, where Tobias Hill lived for two years. ‘Back to the City’ is about London, from hangover to Underground; Hiroshima; and the ‘City of Clocks', a fusion of cities and ages. They are poems crammed with a young man's curiosity and eye for detail, and show his great ability for storytelling.
Main description: This lively second collection from a young, much-travelled writer, falls into two parts. ‘Transit’ includes poems of abroad, especially Japan, where Tobias Hill lived for two years. ‘Back to the City’ is about London, from hangover to Underground; Hiroshima; and the `City of Clocks’, a fusion of cities and ages. They are poems crammed with a young man’s curiosity and eye for detail, and show his great ability for story-telling. Tobias Hill lives in London, and besides writing (his short stories and novels are published by Faber) he reviews and edits several new magazines.
“Hill’s special territory, in poetry and prose, is the ‘urban-pastoral’ … his native North London is transformed, with many deftly dark touches, into an uneasy realm of the imagination. Hill clearly appreciated Simon Armitage’s storytelling persona; he also drew upon observation of the natural world in ways associated with Ted Hughes. Much of his imagery is by turns delicately ‘Japanese’, or reminiscent of the heyday of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ style. Hill has a romantic dimension in his work that is all his own. As a young man with an intense curiosity about the world, his work is full of sensual images, vignettes of city life – and romance … these are poems of flirtation and desire.”
—contemporarywriters.co.uk
“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
Table of contents:
I TRANSIT
The City of Clocks
Transit
Prisons in a Departure Lounge at Midnight
One Day in Hiroshima
from A YEAR IN JAPAN
May
August
October
Homesickness
Playing Japanese Chess with the Elder Mrs Uchida
Sumo Wrestler in Sushi Bar
Earthquake, Osaka
Green Tea Cooling
The Barber's Daughter
Waiting
The Secret of Burning Diamonds
Rio in Carnival
Jael
Three Wishes in a Small Town
The Mule and the Rain
How to Light Dynamite
Flora and the Admiral
II BACK TO THE CITY
London Pastoral
New Verses for Clock City Magpies
North-West London
Love Song
Broken Bone
Playground at 2 am
Sheep's Clothing
Xenophobia
The Woman who talks to Ezra Pound in Tesco
Life Savings
Today the House is Full of Dishcloths
Reasons Why
Meat
July 14th, 10 pm
The Beekeepers
Midnight in the City of Clocks View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
New Verses for Clock City Magpies
Eight for black, nine for white.
Ten for a step and its echo at night.
Eleven for credit, twelve for cash.
Thirteen for pickpockets milling the crush.
Fourteen for blackmail, fifteen for tax.
Sixteen for passion in cul-de-sacs.
Seventeen steps from the porch to the car.
Eighteen for life, with good behaviour.
Nineteen pounds ninety-nine pence-ful of lager.
Twenty plus tips for a blow and a popper.
Twenty-one faces pressed flat to the window.
Twenty-two magpies half-lost in shadow.
One for white, two for black.
Three chances left to guess why they attack.
Review quote: He has developed an austerely sensual technique … As a first collection, this is talented and interesting. Times Literary Supplement Review quote: An impressively controlled first collection … As Hill develops less distanced sensibility to go with his undoubted technique, he could prove to be very interesting. Robert Potts
The Guardian |
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