paper • 118 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-884800-88-7
CRESCENDO
It starts with a screech, a howl,
the brute’s pure note
guarding its kill, sweet wail
as loins lock to further the line,
a fossil’s plaint diminished in stone.
Only slowly, painstaking, tenacious,
are words shaped around the sounds,
the true range to be staked out
in arias, each mastered stage,
until, in achieved splendor,
a man stands dazzlingly alone
amidst the spectacle, the music
an horizon arranged about him,
his mouth holding eternally the O
in which silence empties itself into song.
“Tobin’s graceful movement between what’s lost and the here-and-now, between earthy popular culture and metaphysical concerns, is characteristic of Second Things, a collection of impressive power by a poet fast becoming one of his generation’s finest.” — Ned Balbo, The Antioch Review
“Tobin’s world is made of the marvels and of the terror.” — Library Journal
“[His] poems attempt to do what Yeats suggested was one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.” — Tom Sleigh
“The darkly devotional poems of Daniel Tobin, unsparing, at times harrowing in their awareness…build meaning even of life’s most intractable facts. Praise to the end.” — Eleanor Wilner