Tobin, Daniel: From the Distances of Sleep

These poems and this book are (to borrow from Dan Tobin’s brilliant, tight collection): “Each a leaf / printing its image, / burnt in by light.” — Greg Delanty

This first installment in Tobin’s Gloss Arias consists of imagistic meditations on the eternal uncertainty of images. There are arias here, yes, but the “gloss” in the series title cues us to contradictory impulses: surface luster that masks the truth, commentary that obscures while it explicates. Gracefully, provocatively, Tobin casts his eye on the incandescent present: “From Highbridge Tower / black sparks of birds // carve the moment’s runes / on the sky’s slate.” — Erica Funkhouser

In Daniel Tobin’s From the Distances of Sleep, wit, intellect and the exact image or quick flash of sound surprise and engage the reader immediately. The poems’ brevity serves as a kind of autoclave, rendering beauty and meaning in a moment, and it’s a pleasure to experience these lines hitting their mark through masterful crafting (“black sparks of birds” “your shore man’s swagger”) and surprising insights (“as though I could flower / inside myself, a bomb / locked inside a fist”). Like little bundles poised on the edge of riddle, they double and triple their meanings, and the longer you look the brighter they shine, like constellations in a small space. A joy to read. — Joan Houlihan

The Distances of Sleep opens with Matina, a two-line poem by Ungaretti, incanted as if in the voice of daybreak itself: “I am what illuminates me— / scintilla of immensity.” Dan Tobin’s translation does what every line of this book of sleek short poems so skillfully replicates: it fashions shards of genuine lyric insight, incised in language made to “carve the moment’s runes / on the sky’s slate.” Tobin has learned important lessons from his aphoristic masters of paradox, Simon Weil and Paul Celan. In “Workers,” an image of ants carrying off a dead bee conjures an uncanny marvel of gravity and grace:

All over the bee’s corpse that’s puffed as a fat boy in a rugby jersey, the ants crane fork-lift arms to find the right point. Where will they take it? Are there others widening gates to a city under our feet? the body rises….

And here is “Charm” in all of its eerily glittering intensity:

Cutting off the head, parting the sardine’s body, I discover the spine, lift it from its seam of flesh.

How it dangles, fine as a young girl’s bracelet in my palm.

The fish has been skinned like Marsyas flayed by Apollo, and rendered into the sheerest strands of exquisitely suspended music. This kind of exigency of exactitude and utter fluency, able to render an image of naked atrocity as delicately as it tenders an epiphany of sensuous beauty, is an art of concision with no need to tighten its grip. The poem is offered with an open palm. The book is a charm to treasure. — George Kalogeris

In his epitaph "On Elizabeth L.H." Ben Jonson wrote: "Wouldst thou hear what Man can say / in a little? Reader, stay." Reading these lapidary and glinting poems I'm reminded of masters of the short form--not only Jonson but also that other great Romantic poet, Walter Savage Landor. Daniel Tobin's "From the Distances of Sleep" shows just how far a poet can travel in the space of a few lines. "After the first world / another brightens" writes Tobin in one of the shimmering couplets assembled here. That hopeful note is not unmixed with darkness, as last things shadow these felicitous and shining poems. Do not be deceived by their brevity. The finest epigrams conceal an explosive power: "as though I could flower / inside myself, a bomb / locked inside a fist.” — Askold Melnyczuk