Daniel Tobin: "The House"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “The House” by Daniel Tobin, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poetry, Where the World Is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005). Among his awards are The Discovery/The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, was published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin also has recently edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). He is Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.

A review of The Narrows appeared in “One Poet’s Notes” in January of this year. In addition, to hear Daniel Tobin read a sample of his poetry, I direct readers to an audio clip at Cortland Review.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.