Earthly Delights

The ruminative, elegant fourth book by Jollimore (Syllabus of Errors) opens with an invocation to the muse: "wear me like clothing." These poems relish allusions to visual art, as well as other writers, and personalize particulars in Jollimore%E2%80%99s own life. In the dense, three-page block poem "Marvelous Things Without Number," he nostalgically writes of "eventless days at the beach," and the sand he calls "a relentless ubiquitous grit." In vivid detail, he renders the atmospheric sense of an unrushed summer spent reading Rilke, alongside teenagers playing board games, and "For a while/ it feels as if everything is a reenactment/ of something that has already happened." The poem questions this feeling and its possible purpose, poignantly stating: "stay, you whisper,/ stay just as you are, just a little longer." There is an elegiac quality throughout; the long poem "American Beauty" seeks to look at the losses of Western history through the eponymous film%E2%80%99s lens. As the book%E2%80%99s title suggests, Jollimore%E2%80%99s delight and pleasure in description is evident in these gorgeously textured poems that are equally full of intellectual inquiry and feeling. (Sept.)