Collected Poems

Synopsis

For the first time, this volume gathers together all Tobias Hill’s poems from his four full-length collections in one beautiful and collectable paperback edition, introduced by Maura Dooley.

The Collected Poems marks an important moment in British poetry, drawing together Hill’s work from his Eric Gregory Award-winning debut, Year of the Dog (1995), to the bestselling Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006). Hill’s celebrated ‘urban pastoral’ was decadent yet austere, driven through radical visual desire. Here in one volume we can see the extent of his imaginative journey, travelling through towns and cityscapes, presenting a simmering world of captured lives, haunting, but filled with charm and wit. The early work is dominated by Japan, where Hill lived for two years, yet it is his beloved London that becomes the imaginative centre of his work, filled with the sensuous intensity of that great city.

Tobias Hill was selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets in 2004, 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.

Praise for Previous Work

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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.’ —Publishers Weekly

‘There is no other voice today quite like this.’ —A. S. Byatt

‘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