Belated Heavens (Malcolm McDonald Series Selection) [Paperback]

Daniel Tobin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2010 | Series: Malcolm McDonald Series Selection

Daniel Tobin's fifth book, Belated Heavens, spans from prehistory to modern Manhattan, Neanderthals "cowering in caves" to a man snoring in Penn Station as if he's "swallowed an espresso machine." Tobin delves into timeless themes of violence, destruction and endurance, his poems running the gamut from form to free verse as they offer the reader an underlying hope, a tentative belief, that, yes, we are surviving--somehow, thank heavens.

An award-winning Irish American poet and scholar, Daniel Tobin's assorted iconographic choices will hook every reader, whether by poems about environmental consciousness, murdered heretics, meal bugs or the caves of Lascaux. Throughout the writing is an ever-present violence that at times is as quiet and slow as "an endless tongue of water licking seams / where stone foundation meets concrete floor," while other times is as brute and in your face as a "village idiot's shredded legs." Violence, however, is not the main concern of this collection, but rather how humanity thrives despite the volatility of the world.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and widely anthologized, DANIEL TOBIN is Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: Four Way (October 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935536036
• ISBN-13: 978-1935536031
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,053,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How and Why We Survive, December 8, 2010

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Belated Heavens (Malcolm McDonald Series Selection) (Paperback)

BELATED HEAVENS, a collection of poems by Daniel Tobin, is one of those books that once read the reader thinks he has the poet's messages embedded firmly in the brain. But then subsequent readings are akin to surprises and discoveries that what appeared to be the point of a poem is not exactly as in focus as the original reading proposed. That is but one of the joys of reading Daniel Tobin. He is a wordsmith, a craftsman of form, a seer and the wizard behind the curtain he pulls when the page is turned to see the next creation.

Tobin teases us into travels to different times and places and then taps us on the shoulder with messages about what is in front of us, here, in our own perception of his immediate presence. He can seduce us into a frame of mind (as in 'Intruders') in which we expect a comedy of sorts, a tale about mice in an apartment, and then turn that into a siege of entrapment so viscerally shared that the comedy becomes horror. 'You heard the pitched squeak where we'd set the trap,/ and I came running when you called to find/ trap, bait, and adversary gone, the raw snap/ come down but the tracked body dragged behind/ that ancient storage box - some broken cripple/ with his cart hauled resignedly toward his end.' etc. While in 'The Shrine' he turns the rats into the scavengers of mines in a battle field ...'They hauled it here, dank temple underground,/ Dragged it through grass risen from the dead,/Through soldier's blood, over Hide-And-Seek,/And the village idiot's shredded legs,/ This pristine altar, hot wire apocalypse,/ Un-detonated in the lift of air.'...

Tobin uses titles, seemingly at times to snare our attention to other meanings:

LUNAR ECLIPSE

The distant band's just tuning up in the life you missed.

Even now it darkens, vaguely occult,

a patch slipped on by a one-eyed blind man

whose haunt throbs with song, raw, Andalusian -

the kind of frisson

that pumps a healing shiver through the blood,

as if in spite of pain the earth were good

beyond plain reason. Up there: cloud-molt

clears like cannon shot, and a hint of red

blue-shifted in the shining. Would I could

take a funicular to the aureole

to find you in the innumerable lights

with the rest oft he beloved dead, the Palace

of Memory brimming and the door un-shut.

Life both living and finished, death, the mystery of the past and the beyond, maps toward survival in this strange world - all are aspects of the poetry of Tobin. These are but meager samples of the joys of reading Daniel Tobin's poems. Other favorites, such as 'THE EXECUTIONER'S MEMORIES', 'LAWN THATCHING ON HOLY SATURDAY', 'WINTER STORM, JERUSALEM', 'A PALM PRINT IN LASCAUX' - each of these and many other deserve sharing with one who does not know the magic behind Tobin's pen. This is a treasure trove of poetry, some of the finest we are likely to encounter from one of America's great men of letters. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, December 10

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Watch the images explode in your mind's eye!, January 5, 2011

By 

Jonathon Kosec "Jonathon Kosec" (Orange Grove, Texas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Belated Heavens (Malcolm McDonald Series Selection) (Paperback)

Daniel Tobin's latest work is an outstanding collection of his latest work which is such an amazing collection of evocative images that are something just short of profound. If I could use a food image, each poem is like a solitary bite of your favorite Thanksgiving dinner-you know there is so much more there, yet in this one small bite, you realize there is so much more. I was tickled when I discovered one of my heros from history, Bartolome de Las Casas, was even the subject of a poem. This four part body of work appears to me to be Tobin's best, creating such clear imagery in my mind's eye taht I have found myself going back to it again and again to savor the craft of this artisan of words.

Short of copying the poems here to illustrate my point, I wholeheartedly recommend this latest work of an amazing poet.