Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 276, Volume 50 Number 4, March - April 2024.

on Vinegar Hill Patrick McGuinness
This was written as the preface for the Italian edition of Vinegar Hill,
to be published by Interno Poesia


It ought to be more difficult for one of today’s finest novelists to make the transition into poetry. Where plenty of poets write novels – hence the ambiguous (and often ambivalently-meant) phrase, ‘a poet’s novel’ – there is no corresponding category of ‘novelist’s poem’. The skills of poetry and fiction are not held to be especially transferable, though anyone who has attempted both (from either side of the divide) knows that poems do contain narrative – even if it is ‘just’ the narrative of an emotion over time, or the unfolding of a metaphor across lines – while novels contain plenty of the sorts of things that make poetry, well…, poetic. On the evidence of Colm Tóibín’s first book of poems, more novelists should explore the possibilities of poetry.

For a first collection of poems, albeit by an author who is no newcomer to writing, Vinegar Hill is a substantial and diverse book, and one that feels fully formed. This is poetry that has been, so to speak, lived. It has been allowed to grow, to expand, to test out different narrative and lyric possibilities. What is also clear, from its formal range and its sense of the line, is that Tóibín reads a lot of poetry. It is a book full of variety – of tone, of subject, of time and place and form – and it is a book that speaks of the present even as it understands the ways in which history, ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image