Earthly Delights

Poems

Troy Jollimore

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691218823, 9780691218830
• eBook ISBN: 9780691218847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

THE WHOLE SKY SPARKLING, ALL DIAMONDS

MARVELOUS THINGS WITHOUT NUMBER

Our duty is to see with the eyes of the gods.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

After forty or so summers you kind of get

the idea: the slow deepening of the plum-blue dusk

that offers a backdrop for the stately silhouettes

of disconsolate, sentinel-like telephone poles;

the fading chorus of evening birdsong; the sharp hollow

pong of an aluminum bat making contact

with the ball somewhere off in the distance followed by

the joyful and at the same time somehow mildly

forlorn minor uproar of a clutch of children cheering;

eventless days at the beach, the scorched sand

stinging beneath your feet, the sand in

your clothes and your hair, a relentless ubiquitous

grit that remains undislodged after any

number of showers and shampooings; the familiar

dirt that collects underneath your fingernails

and your hair growing longer; careless

afternoons endured and discharged in the backyard

hammock or a languid folding chair by the lake,

reading Amy Clampitt, reading Rilke;

teenagers playing an eternal game

of Monopoly or Risk that might well be

the very same game they started last summer;

the same hummingbirds taking the same flight paths

back to the endless empty abundance

of the same backyard flowers and feeders …

Some friends are renewing their vows, they were married

a decade ago. Some friends are driving

up to one of the casinos on Friday

to hear a tribute band who have modeled themselves

after Led Zeppelin or Journey.

A friend who left for the East Coast two years

ago has flown back to Chico to take photos

of Mount Lassen exactly one hundred years after

its catastrophic eruption. For a while

it feels as if everything is a reenactment

of something that has already happened: even dumping

a skitter of Raisin Bran into a bowl

and then pouring milk over it, or sitting

on the porch or trying on sneakers takes on

the aura of a ritual. Are you trying

to deny time and change, to say that death

will have no authority here, or are you

celebrating the fact that everything is

in flux and ungraspable, or is the season

doing one or the other of these things for you?

Mornings glow like dreams, like memories, with

a radiance that has been lying latent

in the earth all night, you can do it again

(whatever it is) but you can’t do it over:

the beautiful girl, kissed, can’t be unkissed

(and who would want that anyway? But

you might), and so you repeat, repeat,

repeat, feeling rich with existence and time

and a kind of exhaustion you have learned to savor;

the end of Side B, after all, simply means

that you flip the record over and listen

to Side A again. And did you say that life

would always be this way, or were you told that

by someone in the past, and now hang on to that belief

in the face of what must be mounting but, for now,

still invisible evidence to the contrary?

Stay invisible, you say to it, stay...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Muse
• The Whole Sky Sparkling, All Diamonds
• The Republic Forgets
• Let them see the Images that are Doomed to Disappear
• Though we may at Times Admire the Beauty of their Weapons
• Sing the String Bent Skyward
• Acknowledgments
• Publication Credits
• Series List