David Toms - Hold Over Fire
Veer 2 Publication 058 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-93-6] 15x8" size. 52 pages. B&W September 2026. £8.00 (+ postage and packing)
David Toms - Hold Over Fire
‘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
'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
This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College
‘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
'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
This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College