Hold Over Fire
| By: | David Toms |
| Publisher: | Veer2 |
| Published: | September 2026 |
| Pages: | 52 |
| Language: | English |
| Available as: | Paperback |
| On sale at: |
‘Hold Over Fire is a book of mourning, of welcoming new life and light, of monuments that speak with a sometimes deafening clang, of the fragility of stone and the way its fragments have of birthing new forms in the mind… Its means range from the most delicate open-field analyses of broken lyrics to densely
self-echoing soundings-out of the poet’s own first languages, alert to how each language is changed by the acquisition of a new one. It’s lovely from beginning to end, and I’m deeply moved by it.'
– Peter Manson
Review
'These poems take the world’s contrasting textures as their material: hardness and softness, home and cosmos, death and life weave a text where shards of jewel-bright memory glint against spilled flows of pulsing sound. We hear a complex polyphony in which human voices from the oldest to brand-new mesh with the world’s own music.” – Ellen Dillon "Awash with Nordic and Irish light, its images witty, haunting and delicately realised, Hold Over Fire is a tremendous collection. Its crisp tensile music confirms David Toms as a vital presence in contemporary poetry." – Billy Ramsell "Here we have lament and rejoicing, echoed through cryptic fragments of songs and accounts, errors and misreadings. A bare world, pared down to its rudiments, displayed in words, rubbed and worn and made visible through others, scarcely there. The whole, radiant on the page.” – Trevor Joyce
Other Books From this Author
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8 Sep 2022 - Banshee Press
Pacemaker
By David Toms
"Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart." What is it like to be born with a congenital heart defect? What does it mean to li...
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30 Jun 2016 - Cork University Press
Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877-1937
By David Toms
Today soccer is the global game played by millions of people around the world. This was not always the case. Ireland was one of the first countries to play the game. Played in Ireland since the late n...
