I made two mistakes before beginning my reading of Troy Jollimore’s collection of poems Earthly Delights. The first was my aim to read it over the course of a single afternoon, perched on some campus bench or lawn where I could feel the earth below me and delight. The second was planning to only read through it once.
This is not a collection you finish in a single sitting, nor can its poems be fully experienced with a single read by which I mean, it is turtles all the way down; cinematic and ruminative, packed with references and atmospheres that escape definition. It opens with an invocation to a muse, calling not for a story of rage or of a complicated man, but one of performance—“wear me like clothing”—of singing and of leaving—“you will sing and then you will sing / then you will go / then I will sing / then I will sing / and then go.” Already, in this beginning, the collection anticipates its ending: a poem on Odysseus’ departure from Ithaca, where, one glance backwards having been allowed, Odysseus and the reader “marched down that as yet untranslated road.” This, the last of the moments in a series of poems on unmakings and losses, marks only a new beginning of further creation and retranslation, a road not yet (re)told.
Jollimore’s collection is a world where each poem is a new song, a new mundanity imbued with meaning. A world which is every version of that glance backwards, every step on the untranslated road. It is filled with themes of political insanity and confusion; philosophical ideas on beauty, life, and capitalism; allusions to classical art—most notably in the title poem, reflecting on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights—and meditations on the process of artistic creation. In the poem Marvelous Things Without Number, the reader is pulled into an eternal summer that is always liminal, always repeated, already lived, yet always in flux, saying “you can do it again / (whatever it is) but you can’t do it over.” A few pages further in, Free Huey P. Newton With Every Purchase plays with the irony of capitalism, punching you in the chest the same way Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling does. Or a bit earlier, At Limantour sings to the beauty of living: of knowing your own infinitesimal existence can still contain joys. Peppered throughout the collection, the Screenshots series draws inspiration from popular films, destabilizing the meanings of the surrounding poems through a shorter format, humorous ideas, and political ire. Other poems are flooded with ellipses, contradictions, multiple voices speaking in the same line as they do in Fire: “And what is it in me (do not move / that prefers to think (do not let the gods speak / that to make people feel (let the winds forgive / is the task (i have tried / of the poet?” Some poems soccer punch your emotional solar plexus, others make you chuckle lightheartedly at Schrodinger and his cat then make you whimper on the reread.
Jollimore navigates elegantly through this seemingly chaotic assemblage, taking delight in delving into the Western history of making and unmaking—of memories or objects lost to the passing of time. His collection is rich, lexically and semantically, in intertextual poems tinged with a profound sadness even at their most joyful, examining the possibility of the human being and, indeed, of poetry as palimpsest, as a made and unmade, an unresolved and restless creature. But you—you, dear reader, and me—Jollimore pushes into a world so proximate to reality that we lose ourselves within it. By the end of Earthly Delights we are left scrambling for meanings, revelling in the not-knowing, asking more and more questions which the poet refuses to, or perhaps cannot answer.
Comments