{"product_id":"dusk-empire-new-and-selected-9781961897762","title":"Dusk, Empire: New and Selected","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024\u003c\/i\u003e is a panoramic collection of Daniel Tobin's most exemplary, ambitious, and accomplished poems from nearly forty years at work in the art. These range from his award-winning first book, \u003ci\u003eWhere the World is Made, \u003c\/i\u003e through successive volumes that reveal a progressive deepening of his essential themes even as the poems evolve to an ever more refined technical risk and mastery. These themes include the unflinching encounter with time, suffering, and mortality, as well as what one earlier reviewer called \"a quest for transcendence, a search for the sacred.\" They seek, in short, to do, as another reviewer observed, what Yeats said was \"one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.\" In so doing, Tobin's poems probe the individual life in relation to the pressures of history, including his own family's perilous and traumatic immigration from famine in the 19th century--a backstory he explores in \u003ci\u003eThe Narrows\u003c\/i\u003e, which he has called \"a mural in verse.\" At the same time, his \"Homage to Bartolomeo de las Casas\" delves into the fraught early colonial history of the Americas through the eyes of the eponymous friar, a repentant colonizer. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese earlier works establish Tobin's mastery of the poetic sequence, among a wide variety of other formal displays, all amply evident in the books that follow, including the lyrically meditative orchestrations of \u003ci\u003eSecond Things\u003c\/i\u003e, the award-winning poems of \u003ci\u003eBelated Heavens\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Net\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBlood Labors\u003c\/i\u003e, characterized at once by their compendious erudition, their sense of intellectual and cultural history, as well as their emotional urgency and formal variousness. This generous selection from Tobin's work is intended to be a companion volume to \u003ci\u003eThe Mansions\u003c\/i\u003e, his trilogy of book-length poems that explore twentieth century history, and the counter claims of science and religion, through three exemplary lives, which reviewers said inspired genuine awe. Finally, \u003ci\u003eDusk, Empire\u003c\/i\u003e leads with a gripping selection of new work that engages the enormous pressures and troubles of the present historical moment, set in dialogue with Tobin's characteristic passion for what would transcend it. Or as he asks in \"The Sand Painting,\" \"What is that joyous singing inside the rock \/ Though each intricate, lovely thing will be erased?\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Four Way Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/15\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781961897762\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 304","brand":"Daniel Tobin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52284276834485,"sku":"9781961897762","price":21.25,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/files\/img_3a2364a1-817e-4f50-abf2-4db2689a23c7.jpg?v=1771990456","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/dusk-empire-new-and-selected-9781961897762","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}