The Net

"Daniel Tobin's poems are resolute, humble, lyric, unflinching, and incredibly---painfully---good. the poems in the net bear the responsibilities of conscious witness. and witness is the exact right word. Daniel Tobin doesn't write from the point of view of the narcissistic, monocular he writes simply from The Eye. The poems have vision enough to dilate even the rarest of details and his range of perception extends beyond the periphery; he sees around corners. These poems are visually acute, near brutal in their beauty (hear me---I've read `The Turnpike' a dozen times now; it haunts me like a goddamn ghost and I don't see that changing anytime soon). The whole book's a master class in craft"---Jill Alexander Essbaum

"These are very beautiful poems, and The Net is a very beautiful book---surpassingly so. Some poems are movingly personal, yet are always also about the experience we share as human beings; how we recognize ourselves in how we look at things, in what we read and have read, and in the evidence of our dismaying human lives. In that very way Tobin's marvelous translation of Trakl's `All Souls' memorializes human experience. Tobia also displays an extraordinary capacity for using his resources as a poet through his command of diction and idiom, and through his versification---his ability to produce fluent and expressive metrical lines in sequences (often rhyming in very original, surprising ways) which construct, for each poem, an identifying and powerfully persuasive music, and in his ability to convey also in free-verse the music of impressive thought and feeling. The mastery evident in his uses of these resources is enviable"---David Ferry