Midnight in the City of Clocks

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Author photo © FOLEY John / Opale
	Tobias Hill Midnight in the City of Clocks
	Search for a word or phrase in this book … 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 Noct urne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow Tobias Hill Year of the Dog Tobias Hill Zoo	See larger image HARDBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£12.99~~ £10.39 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$23.95~~ $19.16	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