Earthly Delights: Poems
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.

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Earthly Delights: Poems
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.

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Earthly Delights: Poems

Earthly Delights: Poems

by Troy Jollimore
Earthly Delights: Poems

Earthly Delights: Poems

by Troy Jollimore

Hardcover

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691218830
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 09/14/2021
Series: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets , #176
Pages: 128
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Troy Jollimore is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Syllabus of Errors (Princeton), which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of the year; and At Lake Scugog (Princeton). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Poetry, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. He is professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. Website www.troyjollimore.com Twitter @TroyJollimore

Table of Contents

Muse 1

The Whole Sky Sparkling, All Diamonds

Marvelous Things without Number 5

That Life 8

At Limantour 9

Self-Portrait in Invisible Ink 10

Poem for Gord Downie 12

Early Morning, Upper Bidwell Park 14

Unearned Season 17

André Gregory Said 19

Screenshots: Vanya on 42nd Street 21

Screenshots: Nostalghia 23

The Garden of Earthly Delights 24

The Republic Forgets

A Toast 29

Free Huey P. Newton with Every Purchase 30

Für Alice 32

Silence and Residue of Waters 34

Zapruder Film Blooper Reel 37

Screenshots: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 39

Screenshots: No Country for Old Men 40

Screenshots: The Talented Mr. Ripley 41

Next Life 42

All the Mysteries 43

The Poem You Will Not Live to Write 44

Landscape with Ambiguous Symbols 46

Let Them See the Images that are Doomed to Disappear

Screenshots: Being John Malkovich 51

Screenshots: Boogie Nights 52

Screenshots: Cocksucker Blues 53

American Beauty 54

Though We May at Times Admire the Beauty of their Weapons

Theses to Be Nailed to the Door of the Last of the Golden Age Motion Picture Palaces, Following the Final Screening 69

Screenshots: Delicatessen 72

Screenshots: A Serious Man 74

Screenshots: Certified Copy 75

Want 77

Fire 78

Postscript to Fire 84

Field of Dead Sunflowers 85

The House Committee on Un-American Activities Pauses to Reflect on Its Service to the Country 86

Sing the String Bent Skyward

Spices 91

Screenshots: Paterson 92

Screenshots: Synecdoche, New York 93

Screenshots: Inside Llewyn Davis 95

Song to be Sung When the Instruments Falter 97

Scordatura 98

The Nightingale 101

The Adventure 102

Odysseus Departing 105

Acknowledgments 109

Publication Credits 111

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This engaging and unusual book mixes humor, philosophy, and political ire, drawing repeatedly on film references to examine palimpsestic constructions of the self—the ‘slipping in and out of roles,’ the possibility of two people seeing through a single pair of eyes, the next life that is likewise an earlier life. Jollimore’s riveting language is both familiar and uncanny, somehow as lean and precise as it is lexically rich.”—Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Twice Alive

“Earthly Delights is full of parentheticals, ellipses, allusions, and contradictions. Jollimore’s poems delight in syntax that tries, through capacious twists and turns, to locate what is the real. They raise philosophical questions about nostalgia and representation, melancholy and pleasure that Jollimore never attempts to resolve, preferring instead to place the reader where ‘everything is / in flux and ungraspable.’ A vibrant, restless, and deeply intelligent collection.”—Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale

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