Vinegar Hill is two places representing two things. It’s the site of a battle in 1798 during the Irish Rebellion, in which Irishmen battled against, and lost to, the troops of George III. The site of the battle is just north of Wexford in Ireland, where Colm Tóibín would be born in 1955. And Vinegar Hill is the name of a neighborhood in Brooklyn, next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that had a large Irish American population (so large that New Yorkers referred to it as Irishtown).
The title poem of the poetry collection Vinegar Hill published by Tóibín refers to the site of the battle. “We can see the hill from our house. /” he writes. “It is solid rock in the mornings / As the sun appears from just behind it. / It changes as the day does.” His mother, taking art classes, is trying to paint the hill, but the hill keeps changing. And Tóibín, trying to describe the color, decides there’s no point in invoking history.
The collection has so many American-set poems, and the poet has so many American connections, that the title easily shares connections to that Brooklyn neighborhood. What the two Vinegar Hills share is the hopes and dreams of the Irish people.
To continue reading, Please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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