Earthly Delights

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.

"Sophisticated yet accessible, this sonorous work addresses life in an unillusioned way and will appeal widely."

"[A] ruminative, elegant fourth book by Jollimore. . . . As the book’s title [Earthly Delights] suggests, Jollimore’s delight and pleasure in description is evident in these gorgeously textured poems that are equally full of intellectual inquiry and feeling."

"National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Jollimore presents a new poetry collection richly infused with classical mythology and analysis of classic movies, plays, works of art, and literature, and of relation to creations. . . . Jollimore offers unique perspectives on the self we play at being and the self we are or think we are in poems about singular characters in such films as No Country for Old Men, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Being John Malkovich. Jollimore's immersions raise the question, Are we simply vessels to be filled?"

“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