Vinegar Hill by Colm Tóibín
Beacon Press, Paperback release: April 2023, $16.95
This collection of poems, the first from novelist, journalist, short story writer, and essayist Colm Tóibín, was written over many years. That is why, perhaps, the poems are so far-ranging in place and time, and in thought and emotion. Tóibín’s singular vision—and his mordant wit—bind them together.
Tóibín, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and who wrote a bestseller, Brooklyn, that was made into a critically acclaimed movie, writes of many things, including his childhood in Ireland and freeways in Los Angeles, love and death, Covid and the ever-changing light, being gay then and now, politics and religion, and literary and artistic greats. There’s hardly a subject Tóibín hasn’t thought about and/or encountered in a varied life that took him from a student at University College in Dublin to, at present, a professor at Columbia University in New York City.
Though Tóibín might have chosen to divide his poems up by topic, he did not. And thus, as the reader turns the pages, each poem is a surprise of sorts—a journey into the unknown. In “The Long Trick,” for example, he’s a passenger on the Estonia before it sank, and on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef after two divers died out there. Snorkeling on said reef, he reminds himself that he’s safe with the boat nearby. Still, there’s, “The swell that is unnatural even at the best of times, All highs and lows, untrustworthy even when calm, Just undulating willfulness, no conscience, no regrets.”
A common thread is Tóibín’s clarity of vision and unadorned prose. In an interview with NPR, Tóibín says he was the latest of his siblings to come to the world of books, and as a result, he became “a better noticer.” In his “Prayer to St. Agnes,” who was one of the Catholic Church’s virgin martyrs, he asks, “O holy St. Agnes, cure me of metaphor!” and allow him “see what really is.”
These are poems that bear reading and rereading for they, like the light Tóibín often notices, their meaning shifts with moods and times of day.