Tobias Hill

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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:  9781844714131
ISBN:  9781844714131
Author:  Tobias Hill
Title:  Zoo
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
Midnight in the City of Clocks

Tobias Hill
Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow

Tobias Hill
Year of the Dog

Main description:  Zoo is Tobias Hill’s third collection of poems. It shows the growing maturity of a voice already distinctive three years ago, when his first collection was noted for its ‘grand irony and playful humour, with episodes of tenderness and even charm’.

Hill’s poems combine narrative impetus with musical lyricism. Influenced by the poetry of Japan and the paintings of Edward Hopper, they are full of intense sound, smell, and visions, Often through a nocturnal eye, Hill describes an urban-pastoral landscape, full of the greenhouse luxuriance of city flora, fauna and humanity.

“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:
Magnolia Flowers
Draining the Grand Union
Twelfth Night
Sushi
Michael the Zoo Keeper
The Elephant Girl
Closing Time
Leonardo’s Machines
Gibbons in a Northern Spring
How to Curse
Flora & Fauna
Drunk Autumn Midnight below Victoria Embankment
The Patron Saint of Prisoners
Prospero’s Cell
Doctor Crippen in Love
Lime Light
Poem for a North London Wedding
Snapshot of an Egotist
Self-Portraits by Children
Saturday Night Fever
A Night in the Room of a Clown
Excerpts from a London Zoo Guide Book, 1928
The Islands of Pumpkins
Dowsing with Whalebones
A Page of a Guide to a Small Island
A Crossroads
The Sound of Cages
The Pilot in Winter
Nightlight

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Excerpt from book:  

Prospero’s Cell

The whorehouses and warehouses
of munificent Milan
ring with cash and industry
behind their locks and doors.

In the Street of the Land of the Flies
and the Street of the Lamb
loiterers unlock hard grins

of gold (and gold is as hard as trade)
to drink to him, the Exiled Duke,
under a sky
broken with flags.

They don’t care that the freelancers still talk
of heresies. a stave, a book.
Witches won’t drown, and nor will Dukes
is what some say, or they say

At least he is a Christian,
the man exiled to thirst and sea-salt
guilt-marked by fulfilled punishmnet,
like Griglie, the demagogue,
who has no tongue to tell his lies.

—The feasts of saints are kept,
and trade by land and sea is good.
Better than good (they say his blood
is white with impotence, his feet
always naked, and all he says is Where is my cell, Where
is my daughter?)—

Hidden by laws and tapestries,
The Duke grows old. A Little man,
salt skin and an artist’s hands.

Nothing to do. Nothing to say
of city-states — of Burgundy,
ransomed by the Arabic
for twelve white falcons
brought from the islands of sea-ivory —

Nothing to him. His voice is latitudes, distances,
empty aisles of libraries.
The stained light of the Venetian glass
stains his face with what he sees —

He sees the retch of storms and words. The island
in itself. The ocean’s plow and sow.
The talk of a daughter drowned by wind.
Something said there, not caught, and still to know.