Year of the Dog

Tobias Hill’s first full-length collection, Year of the Dog, won an Eric Gregory award in 1995. Dominated by images and narratives from Hill’s stay in Japan, as well as other travel poems, the book contains Hill’s celebrated sequence ‘A Year in Japan’, with its sweeping filmic narratives of the poets encounters in a distant and strange land. Hill’s skills in depicting urban pastoral landscapes and human tableux are much in evidence. Now made available in a new edition, this hard to obtain work will delight fans and collectors.

“Hill’s special territory, in poetry and prose, is the ‘urban-pastoral’ … his native North London is transformed, with many deftly dark touches, into an uneasy realm of the imagination. Hill clearly appreciated Simon Armitage’s storytelling persona; he also drew upon observation of the natural world in ways associated with Ted Hughes. Much of his imagery is by turns delicately ‘Japanese’, or reminiscent of the heyday of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ style. Hill has a romantic dimension in his work that is all his own. As a young man with an intense curiosity about the world, his work is full of sensual images, vignettes of city life – and romance … these are poems of flirtation and desire.” — contemporarywriters.co.uk

“The closeup detail taken directly from nature, then skewed through 90* to give the reader something completely new, even unique … with this third collection, Hill promises to be a real force in poetry, displaying an utterly contemporary understanding of how nature continues to work.” — Poetry Review

Table of contents

London Pastoral
Close
The Mosquito’s Opposite
Waiting
In The Rooms Of The Plague House
The Secret Of Burning Diamonds
A Year In Japan:
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Snake Oil
Night-Ride, Japan
On The Island Of Pearls
Today The House Is Full Of Dishcloths
Rio In Carnival
Dreaming Of Home
Prelude
From The Bullet Train
On The Slow Mountain Train
Green Tea Cooling
Jael
The Vampire’s Price
The Long Road To Silence
The Barber’s Daughter
The Ritual Of Making
Makondi Sculpture