PBS: Tobias Hill

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Tobias Hill
Midnight in the City of Clocks Carcanet Oxford Poets £6.95

	Tobias Hill’s poems inspired by his two years living in Japan make compelling reading. Starting with the unfamiliar he draws us closer, to a girl sleeping with ‘the sun filming her face’ or to children hunting cicadas, allowing us moments of understanding. Many of his other poems take London as their theme, a place no less exotic and beguiling than Japan. Here the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and a personal and hidden side of the city springs out at us, sharply observed and true. Click here to return to the list of Next Generation Poets

London Pastoral

I want to tell you something:
for three nights now a bird has sung
in the road trees. A water song.
The neighbours are complaining; no one
knows what species the bird is. No one
even sees it. Pools coupons
titter against chain-links. Chip cartons
scuttle past time-delayed,
time-locked shopfronts. Then the bird
starts to sing.

You’ll hear it with the window open,
even when the first rain gathers
to a downpour, hallways sweet
with the residue of road-tar.
Then you can grin,
or watch me grin at woodpigeons in wet weather
sat in the road trees, suffering
damp white collars. Like divorcees,
not looking at one another.

from Midnight in the City of Clocks

Biography
Poet and novelist Tobias Hill was born in 1970 in London, where he still lives. He read English at Sussex University and spent two years teaching in Japan. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Year of the Dog (1995); Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), influenced by his experiences living in Japan; and Zoo (1998), which coincided with his tenure as Poet in Residence at London Zoo. He is author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Skin (1997), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. His other fiction includes the novels Underground, published in 1999, The Love of Stones and The Cryptographer.