Within The Narrows Tobin introduces readers to an interesting cast of characters—mother, father, brother, uncles, aunts, grandparents, neighbors—and brilliant scenes, at home in New York or overseas in ancestral Ireland, he believes most noteworthy in their lives, as well as in his own. In fact, about three-dozen poems name places in their titles, from a specific address in Brooklyn (“502 Schenck Avenue”) to the site of his brother’s Buddhist monastery (“Thinking of Meade Mountain”) and across the ocean to locales in Ireland seen during Tobin’s “reverse journey” to the land of his ancestors (“Inishboffin Suite”).