Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Syllabus of Errors: Poems

Syllabus of Errors: Poems

Jollimore, Troy

Paperback

Series: Princeton Contemporary Poets, Book 109

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $20.95

ISBN10: 0691167680
ISBN13: 9780691167688
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Sep 29 2015
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.80 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

A new collection of poetry from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

. . . 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?

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