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Daniel Tobin’s stunning new collection, Double Life, takes its name from a vision of humanity at once passionately earthbound and spurred by the metaphysical. These poems range from haunting meditations on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch to an astonishing polyphonic sequence based on the life of Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, who died in 1566 and wrote the first bill of rights in the New World. Between these two longer orchestrations appear works both musically diverse and startling in their formal virtuosity, as attuned to Plato, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, and the natural world as to TV talk shows, the news, physics, movies, and fast-food restaurants. From the persona of an Irish-Catholic Brooklyn youth on a school trip to Spain to that of a grown man of the suburbs “hollowed by doubt . . . / it’s only the observance / of words I keep now to stay the soul,” Tobin shows us the search for a way to encompass the world, turning Christian motifs toward new meanings.
The poet’s voice in Double Life is unmistakably contemporary—earnest and responsive, wary and hardened. Through language lush with meaning, imagery, and high-energy prosodic effects, Tobin deepens and extends the harrowing awareness of mortality, history, and the quest for transcendence that so deeply marked his award-winning first book of poems.
How, you said, you used to sleep — the way
the mummy’s hand flared awkwardly, twisted
just so, transposings of the quick and dead
made tractable behind glass. In his day:
tombs stocked full as bomb shelters, the soul
beaked and twittering over the body’s haunts,
or casting out from rushes in the sun’s boat.
What scares is how I see you, not cured, gaunt
as this shell, but a child curled in your bed,
your small hand in the shape of something gone
but for its remnant. As if someone wedded
these worlds as unalike as skin and stone.
Or as though the wind had stopped to trace
its image in the sphinx’s disappearing face.
From “At the Egyptian Exhibit” published in Double Life: Poems by Daniel Tobin. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Tobin. All rights reserved.
Daniel Tobin is the author of Where the World Is Made, cowinner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in Poetry. He has also been awarded the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award of the Cumberland Review, and the Robert Frost Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have been published in Stand, Poetry, American Scholar, Paris Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Southern Review, and many other journals. He is chair of the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston.
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