Syllabus of Errors: Poems - Paperback

by Troy Jollimore (Author)

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?"

Back Jacket

"Thanks be to the powers of serious play. Rueful, resourceful, witty, and tender, Troy Jollimore's poems are at once a triumph of virtuosity and an extraordinary tribute to the amplitude of the human heart. Tonic in their clarity of means, joyful in their engagement with form, they also bespeak the rigor of a philosophical mind. I know no living poet who has been able to pursue such large ambitions with so transparent an instrument."--Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014

Author Biography

Troy Jollimore is the author of two previous collections of poetry, "At Lake Scugog" (Princeton) and "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the "New Yorker," "McSweeney's," the "Believer," and other publications. He is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico.