Tobias Hill

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Biographical note:  Selected as one of the country's Next Generation poets, shortlisted for the 2004 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and named by the TLS as one of the best young writers in the country, Tobias Hill is one of the leading British writers of his generation. His award-winning collections of poetry are Year of the Dog, Midnight in the City of Clocks, and Zoo. His fiction has been published to acclaim in many countries. AS Byatt has observed that “There is no other voice today quite like this.”

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714254
ISBN:  9781844714254
Author:  Tobias Hill
Title:  Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  11-Nov-07
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  In this latest collection of poems, Hill invokes people and place, mythologizing and demythologizing city lives as they are led. From poignant vignettes and celebrations to urban-pastoral and elegy, these poems extend Hill’s romance with London’s psychic and surreal fabric. Selected as a Next Generation poet, Hill continues to delight us with sensuous observation and imaginative embrace.

“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

Meet the author:

Podcasts

Play A Year in London: November (2 MB)


Play A Year in London: December (1.9 MB)


Play Five Ways of Looking at my Grandfather (5.6 MB)


Play The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat (2 MB)


Play TV Dinner (640 KB)

Table of contents:
From the Diaries of Henry Morgan, Summer 1653
Repossession
To a Boy on the Underground
A Year in London
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
TV Dinner
Synthesis
Gravity
The Gifts
The Nightworkers
The Orator
Amphibians
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat
Five Ways of Looking at my Grandfather
The Woman Who Likes Standing Under Trees in the Rain
Nine in the Morning in the Station Bar
Yellow
A Bowl of Green Fruit
The Wave
Horse Chestnuts
Summer Late Night Opening
Nocturne

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Excerpt from book:  

The Woman Who Likes Standing Under Trees in the Rain

The woman who likes standing under trees in the rain.
The woman who liked whistling like a man.
The woman who stayed a night and laughed
in her sleep. The woman who stayed a night
and who I didn't see again

for seven years, then stood there smiling
as if we'd never spent a night apart.
The woman who only liked kissing
heavy smokers. The woman who dreamt
I threw her from a moving train.
The woman who said do what you want with me
and wept when I did.

The woman who loved the smell of blood
and petrol stations. The woman who loathed
the smell of fireworks. The woman who hated
carnations, and never much liked music.

On journeys, stuck in traffic,
or leant to catch the small talk of a smoker,
or under the pyrotechnic flowers
of New Years’ Eves and bonfires,

I catch myself thinking of them,
recalling what they did to me and me to them,
and don't wish there were more of them
half so much as I once did,

and still, will sometimes stop and try to think
what it was I ever liked or loved
about a woman who never much liked music.

Unpublished endorsement :  In lucid narrative manner Tobias Hill celebrates cosmopolitan London as a location for the affections. The city is presented as a functioning organism – a sub-class of nature – full of observed detail in development. The rhythms owe something to Eliot but the mood is more Cockayne than Purgatory, the imagery more Robert Doisneau than Robert Frank, the precision more Louis MacNeice than Philip Larkin. London in Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow is an object of love with the shadow of 7/7 hanging over it, the poetry touching it gently, curiously and carefully with full awareness of its fragility.

George Szirtes

Review quote:  In careful rhythms, the 21 poems of this British poet's fourth collection describe the “collision” of opposites that Londoners and other city dwellers live with daily: e.g., the city’s smell of “Peking duck and piss.” Repo-men and aging chess players, pigeons and Chinese supermarkets, sidewalk preachers and railway station bars all populate these neat stanzas. While echoing Larkin in his desire to look unflinchingly, Hill is ultimately more optimistic about the human condition. Many poems insist on some kind of sweetness, even a lost one, as in the penultimate section of “A Year in London,” a poem with a section for each month; after suggesting bombs falling, the poem ends with fireworks: “[a]nd all that brilliance was ours / in our dreams that night.” Hill also sounds at times like Frost, another polestar for plainspoken poets: describing a young couple fixing up an abandoned house, he writes, “[a]ll this was years ago. And now you’re here, / the two of you scything the bittersweet.” Occasionally, what Hill (Zoo, 1998) encounters in the contemporary world is so awful that only silence or disbelief are appropriate: “[t]he death toll mounts every morning. / It grows unspeakable.”

Publishers Weekly

Review quote:  What Hill reveals to us in this vital, luminous collection is that 200 years later, collision is still the city's essential state. In a book-length love song to the fabulousness and ragged beauty of his native London, he considers the city through the lattice of physical and metaphorical dialectics – nature and manufacture, wealth and poverty, glamour and grime – that bring it to life. […] It is rare to come across a collection of poetry that you know with certainty you will still be reading years from now, but for me, this is such a book.

Sarah Crown
The Guardian

Review quote:  Salt has a real winner in Tobias Hill’s Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow … of your preference is for a poetry you share in, enter into imaginatively, then Hill is your man … bringing London to life sensuously, giving it a real cosmopolitan lived-in feel.

Matt Simpson
Stride Magazine

Review quote:  Tobias Hill’s new collection announces its arrival as one such London-loving book from the first poem, written in a historical fiction genre. You can't help cheering the lust for life. […] in one striking poem, ‘Repossession’, there's a marrying of storytelling (or backstory telling) with Hill’s engaging conversational style. Surprisingly I think of Edward Thomas here. Like several of Thomas’s poems, this is a text about depopulation and the casual, almost intimate rhythm, is especially effective.

Richard Price
The Scotsman