Daniel Tobin
Daniel Tobin (born January 13, 1958) is an American poet, scholar, editor, and essayist, and the winner of numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Books Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Award, among many others. Life. Daniel Tobin was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York to Gerard Tobin and Helen Ruane Tobin. Both parents were of Irish ancestry, and his upbringing in Brooklyn and his ancestral links to Ireland inform his poetry, scholarship, and teaching. He graduated from Xaverian High School before  attending Iona College where he graduated with a B.A. in Religious Studies, as well as in Psychology. He also graduated from Harvard University with a Master of Theological Studies, from Warren Wilson College with an M.F.A. in Poetry, and from the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature. He has taught at James Madison University in Virginia, Carthage College in Wisconsin, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, with which he maintains an affiliation. He is presently Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in  Boston, where he served previously as Department Chair and Interim Dean of the School of the Arts. He is a citizen of both America and Ireland where he keeps close personal and professional ties. He is married to poet and scholar, Christine Casson Reception of the Poetry. Daniel Tobin's poems have appeared in a myriad of journals, from The "Times Literary Supplement" to The "Paris Review" to "Poetry", and hundreds of others on both sides in America and Europe, as well as in more than fifty anthologies, including The "Norton Introduction to Poetry". Tobin's first book of poems , "Where the World is Made", won the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize. The poems reveal a quest for transcendence with a strong theological impulse, though without appeal to dogma. The judge of the award, Ellen Bryant Voigt, called the book “a musical Bildungroman… a first book of remarkable authority.” Edward Hirsch praised the book as a “work profoundly alert to spiritual matters” composed of ‘finely wrought poems… in search of the sacred,” and Eleanor Wilner viewed the poems as “darkly devotional… unsparing, unsparing at times harrowing in their awareness.” Double Life followed "Where the World is Made", a book that gained  particular praise for its polyphonic sequence on the life of the Spanish plantation master turned friar, Bartolome de las Casas, and its “Homage to Bosh,” a long ekphrastic poem based on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosh. Eamonn Wall described "The Narrows", Tobin's third book which he describes as a “mural in verse” as “a prodigious feat of raw physical, moral, psychic and literary energy.” Of the book B.H Fairchild wrote: “All stories of arrival and survival in America are the American story, but rarely are they told as compellingly as this one… a poem of narrative power and astonishing  lyric depth and grace.” A review of "Second Things", his fourth book, marked Tobin as fast becoming “one of the best poets of his generation.” "Belated Heavens", in turn, won the Massachusetts Book Award. Of "The Net", Tobin's sixth book of poems, David Ferry remarked: These are very beautiful poems, and "The Net" is a very beautiful book” that displays “an extraordinary capacity for using his resources as a poet through his command of diction and idiom, and through his versification.” “The whole book is a master class in craft,” remarked Jill Alexander Essbaum. The book-length poem "From  Nothing", on the life of Jesuit priest and physicist, George LeMaitre, won the Julia Ward Howe Award and is part of a proposed three book trilogy. On "From Nothing", Emily Grosholz reflects, “the poet draws the weft of scientific vocabulary through the warp of everyday speech.” “In From Nothing,” Alan Shapiro declared, “Tobin brings his learning and astounding imaginative powers to bear on such central questions as the origin and end of the universe… a memorable, powerful and moving book that should be read by everyone who wonders how we got here and what our being here can mean.” Stepehn  Schneider called "The Stone in the Air", Tobin's suite of translations from the German of Paul Celan, “compelling and haunting, a testimony to the power of language and poetry to confront the unspeakable.” The New York Times named "Blood Labors" one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year. “Blood Labors is an ebullient and ecclesiastical wonder, capturing more of creation, the uncreated, and the recreated than any dozen books on a poetry bookshelf,” Barbara Ras commented, “[it] dazzles with its brilliance.” Reception of Scholarship and Essays. Daniel Tobin has published numerous essays on poetry and poetics in journals  like "The Writer’s Chronicle", "New Hibernia Review", "Befrois", and "Etudes Irlandais", and others, many of which have been reprinted in essay collections such as "The Measured Word" and "Complexities of Motion". His book, "Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney", is regarded as the foremost study of religious motifs in Irish the Nobel laureate's work. His essay “Beyond Maps and Atlases: Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney” takes up the subject in Heaney's later work, and appears with essays by other major Heaney scholars in “The  Soul Exceeds its circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien. "Awake in America" appeared in 2011, also to wide praise. “This incisive and moving critique of poetry and tradition pushes the frontiers of Irish Studies,” Joseph Lennon observed, and it challenges “scholars and readers to survey a new country of Irishness, at once inner, ardent and textual.” In "On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence", Tobin takes on the largest questions of meaning and durability of language turned to art in the wake of postmodernism. Rosanna Warren called it “a complex, sophisticated, and magnanimous book,” and Bruce  Bond hailed it as a book of “unflinching sobriety and daring [in a] conversation too often shrill with hyperbole or lackluster with a chronic failure to commit... a smart and beautiful book.” Editorial Work. Tobin's "The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present" is recognized internationally as the definitive volume of its kind. With its publication, Smurfit Professor of Irish Studies, Eamonn Wall, credited Tobin with “the invention of a whole new field.” "Light in Hand: The Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge", brought to new light the work of the transnational feminist, leftist  poet after decades of neglect. The Poetry Society of the United Kingdom awarded his later edited volume, "To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge", a "Special Commendation". "Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art" (with poet Pimone Triplett) brings together craft essays from the faculty of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, with all royalties donated to the philanthropic organization Friends of Writers to support the Holden Diversity Scholarships, among other awards for adult writers. Works. Criticism. Critical Studies and Essays Editor