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:  9781844714780
ISBN:  9781844714780
Author:  Tobias Hill
Title:  Year of the Dog
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-08
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Tobias Hill’s first full-length collection, Year of the Dog, won an Eric Gregory award in 1995. Dominated by images and narratives from Hill’s stay in Japan, as well as other travel poems, the book contains Hill’s celebrated sequence ‘A Year in Japan’, with its sweeping filmic narratives of the poets encounters in a distant and strange land. Hill’s skills in depicting urban pastoral landscapes and human tableux are much in evidence. Now made available in a new edition, this hard to obtain work will delight fans and collectors.

“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

Table of contents:
London Pastoral
Close
The Mosquito’s Opposite
Waiting
In The Rooms Of The Plague House
The Secret Of Burning Diamonds
A Year In Japan:
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Snake Oil
Night-Ride, Japan
On The Island Of Pearls
Today The House Is Full Of Dishcloths
Rio In Carnival
Dreaming Of Home
Prelude
From The Bullet Train
On The Slow Mountain Train
Green Tea Cooling
Jael
The Vampire’s Price
The Long Road To Silence
The Barber’s Daughter
The Ritual Of Making
Makondi Sculpture

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Excerpt from book:  

From the Bullet Train

At the far edge
of the arclit terminus
an old man sits in the sunlight
between his backdoor and the tracks,
scooping white pumpkin seeds
from their yellow hollow
with a black lacquer bowl.

Beside me, the businessman’s wife
sleeps with her face averted
from her husband or lover,
not quite smiling. Silence
and slow motion. Her eyes open.
The pupils are
pinpoints of thought.

the carriage leans
into the curve of the track,
picking up speed. Zinc roofs
below the viaduct and blue smoke
from the piano factory —
passed in a moment. The sea
levels the horizon.

“Sashimi. Coffee or tea.”
The businessman eats raw eel
from a polystyrene dish
patterned with copper clouds.
I turn. Outside

a swamp town. Sluggish flats
of rice and buckwheat.
A horse and cart.
By its mother’s side the colt
running on graceless legs,
learning movement
to the sound of the wheel —

Gone. I sleep and wake only
when the businessman’s wife
touches my arm. She points;
bamboo blossom, that flowers
once in every hundred years.

Sallow flowers hung
from a sheaf of spears.