Tobin, Daniel: The Mansions

Four Way Books, paperback

Publication Date: September 15, 2023

Publisher Marketing: From award-winning poet Daniel Tobin comes The Mansions, an epic trilogy of book-length poems which examine exemplary 20th- Century figures Georges Lemaître, Simone Weil, and Teilhard de Chardin. Capacious in their philosophical explorations, immaculate form, and alchemy of faith and empiricism, each complete section works autonomously while also functioning as part of a whole, building a house that contains many mansions, simulating the dynamic enormity of creation itself -- always already entire and yet unfinished, borderless, infinite. Immersed in a timeline when cataclysmic geopolitical events coincided with revolutionary scientific progression, The Mansions charts a Dantean journey as it confronts the exigencies and contingencies which define modernity: history, religion, our planet's fate, and the purpose of humankind. A fractal symphony of voices, Tobin's tripartite collection represents a staggering literary achievement -- a lyric that can hold the totality of the divine and of godlessness, that harmonizes time as change and as eternity, that sees "pendant grapes" as "embodied wine." Its music is the harvest "cutting free the perfectly nurtured bruise-colored fruit, hour / by hour," and its wisdom is the transience of all things and the obliteration of the self, that everlasting impermanence: "'I see the landscape as it is when I'm not there.'"