Syllabus of errors : poems / by Troy Jollimer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jollimore, Troy, 1971- author.

Series:

Princeton series of contemporary poets

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

viii, 98 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2016].

Summary:

...we are fixed to perpetrate the species-I meant perpetuate-as if our duty? were coupled with our terror. As if beauty itself were but a syllabus of errors. Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book," and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore's first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal. Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo," is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet's favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?" Book jacket.

Contents:

I On Birdsong

On Birdsong 3

Inventory 4

Ache and Echo 5

On the Origins of Things 11

Critique of Judgment 12

Homer 13

Oriole 15

Past Imperfect 16

II On Beauty

On Beauty 23

Syllabus of Errors 24

Cutting Room 26

My Book 29

Going Viral 30

Bone 32

Possession 35

Death by Landscape 36

Second Wind 37

The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard 38

III On Blindness

On Blindness 43

The Apples 45

Charlie Brown 47

Some Men 49

The Proselytizers 51

Universal 52

Photograph 54

Polaroid Model 1000 OneStep, Circa 1978 55

Ars Poetica 57

The New Joys 59

IV When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth

Tamara 63

The Task 64

More Broken than Yours 66

Fireworks 68

Lament 69

The Fourteen-Hour Orgasm 71

Not Enough 72

Poem for the Abandoned Titan Missile Silos Just North of Chico, California 76

Autumn Day (after Rilke) 77

The Small Rain 78

When You Lift: the Avocado to Your Mouth 79

V Vertigo

Vertigo 83

VI Concluding Unscientific Postscript

[maybe I just need time to grieve] 95.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 98).

ISBN:

9780691167688

0691167680

OCLC:

925485780