Daniel Tobin

Poet's Work, Poet's Play

Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art

A follow up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilnor, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.

Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen and many others, Poet?s Work, Poet's Play---like its predecessor volume---will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.

"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts."
—Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review

Selected Works

Criticism
Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
“A valuable contribution to modern Irish literary scholarship... Invigorating and commendable.” —Modern Language Review
Essays
Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art
"Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value." ---Laurence Goldstein, editor, Michigan Quarterly Review
Poetry
Second Things
"...Tobin seems more ambitious than many of his contemporaries...." —critic Christopher Bock, Harvard Review
The Narrows
“All stories of arrival and survival in America are THE American story, but rarely are they told as compellingly as this one."
--B.H. Fairchild
Double Life
“This is a grave and thoughtful collection.”
--Mark Jarman
Where the World is Made
"Packed with articulate, sensitive, accessible poems." -Library Journal
Poetry Anthology
Light in Hand: The Selected Poems of Lola Ridge
"Lola Ridge stood a little apart from the rest, with what it is not too much to characterize as her own genius." —William Rose Benét
The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present
“...a prodigious and remarkable work of literary scholarship.”
--Eamonn Wall

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