![At Lake Scugog](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![At Lake Scugog](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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At Lake Scugog
Poems
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
This is an eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a "snappy, entertaining book." A triumphant follow-up to that acclaimed debut, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore "a new and exciting voice in American poetry."
Jollimore is a professional philosopher, and in witty and profound ways his formally playful poems dramatize philosophical subjects--especially the individual's relation to the larger world, and the permeable, constantly shifting border between "inner" and "outer." For instance, the speaker of "The Solipsist," suspecting that the entire world "lives inside of your skull," wonders "why / God would make ear and eye / to face outward, not in." And Tom Thomson--a character who also appeared in Jollimore’s first book--finds himself journeying like an astronaut through the far reaches of the space that fills his head, an experience that prompts him to ask that a doorbell be installed "on the inside," so that he can warn the world before "intruding on’t."
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From At Lake Scugog:
LOBSTERS
Troy Jollimore
?
tend to cluster in prime numbers, sub-
oceanic bundles of bug consciousness
submerged in waking slumber, plunged in pits
of murk-black water. They have coalesced
out of the pitch and grime and salt suspended
within that atmospheric gloom. Their skin
is colorless below. But when exposed
to air, they start to radiate bright green,
then, soon, a siren red that wails: I’m dead.
The meat inside, though, is as white as teeth,
or the hard-boiled egg that comes to mind
when one cracks that crisp shell and digs beneath.
Caress the toothy claw-edge of its pincer
and you will know the single, simple thought
that populates its mind. The lobster trap is elegance
itself: one moving part: the thing that’s caught.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jollimore's debut, Tom Thompson in Purgatory (2006), surprised almost all observers when it won the NBCC Award. This sophomore effort mostly continues in the first book's nervous, witty, self-conscious, at times self-despising modes. New sonnets about the character Tom Thompson indulge in light comedy ("Who'd I blurb? Or who did I let// blurb me?"), but retain the moving undertones of fear: "His curse,// which he curses with all his heart, is to hate this curs-/ ing, hating heart of his." Pantoun, epigram, terza rima, puns, and invented forms with new rhyming requirements make much of the volume a pleasure in terms of technique. Always clever, at times Jollimore can be merely clever, his search for a topic the only topic that can keep him on track. It is a kind of writing perfected already by an earlier generation, by John Hollander and Daryl Hine. Altogether different and hard to forget are the poems on which Jollimore concludes: stern, vulnerable, lyrical reactions to environmental peril. The 10-page "His Master's Voice," addressed apparently to a child, looks at the future of civilization, at our culpable arrogance, and at how "songs" might help set us right.