Earthly Delights
Poems
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a new collection of philosophical, elegiac, and wry meditations on film, painting, music, and poetry itself
Earthly Delights begins with an invocation to the muse and ends with the departure of Odysseus from Ithaca. In between, Troy Jollimore’s distinguished new collection ranges widely, with cinematic and adventurous poems that often concern artistic creation and its place in the world. A great many center on films, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The title poem reflects on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, while another is an elegy for Gord Downie, the lead singer and lyricist for the cult rock band The Tragically Hip. Other poems address various forms of political insanity, from the Kennedy assassination to today’s active shooter drills, and philosophical ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s musings on beauty to John D. Rockefeller’s thoughts on the relation between roses and capitalist ethics. The book’s longest poem, “American Beauty,” returns repeatedly to the film of that name, but ultimately becomes a meditation on the Western history of making and looking, and—like many of the book’s poems—an elegy for lost things.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ruminative, elegant fourth book by Jollimore (Syllabus of Errors) opens with an invocation to the muse: "wear me like clothing." These poems relish allusions to visual art, as well as other writers, and personalize particulars in Jollimore's own life. In the dense, three-page block poem "Marvelous Things Without Number," he nostalgically writes of "eventless days at the beach," and the sand he calls "a relentless ubiquitous grit." In vivid detail, he renders the atmospheric sense of an unrushed summer spent reading Rilke, alongside teenagers playing board games, and "For a while/ it feels as if everything is a reenactment/ of something that has already happened." The poem questions this feeling and its possible purpose, poignantly stating: "stay, you whisper,/ stay just as you are, just a little longer." There is an elegiac quality throughout; the long poem "American Beauty" seeks to look at the losses of Western history through the eponymous film's lens. As the book's title suggests, Jollimore's delight and pleasure in description is evident in these gorgeously textured poems that are equally full of intellectual inquiry and feeling.
