What do you think?
Rate this book
Tom Thomson in Purgatory
Poetry. Winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. "TOM THOMSON IN PURGATORY falls gracefully into the American tradition of the extended persona poem...Troy Jollimore knows how to trot forth a character as distinct as one who might be encountered in sharply rendered fiction...Of course, we know and delight in the knowledge that Tom Thomson is a verbal phantom, the result of the poet's word-spinning, but at the same time we lean forward to believe in him--our hero for the moment, a man of the hour...Reading this book, you are bound to take both Tom Thomson and his creator to your heart and to savor the miscellany of other poems that make up this superb collection"--Billy Collins.
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2006
About the author
Troy Jollimore
18 books13 followersTroy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013).
Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (Studies in Ethics, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."
His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.
Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Walrus, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.
Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (Studies in Ethics, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."
His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.
Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Walrus, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 31, 2007
Reviewers have been saying Jollimore resembles John Berryman, but I think he is more in tune with Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell, maybe some Adrienne Rich. He writes really enjoyable and beautiful poems!
September 7, 2017
We can see the gates of hell, of heaven, we do not have that view.
June 9, 2025
Sheer pleasure
November 18, 2009
Although Troy Jollimore’s mastery of form is apparent in Tom Thomson in Purgatory, it’s the consistent inconsistencies of the title character that make this a book of poems rather than just a collection.
We formally meet Tom Thomson in the third poem of the book, “Trout Quintet.” He lives in a superhuman place and does superhuman things, so I can’t stop watching this enigma. In part three of the quintet, “He has perfect pitch,” but in part five, “Tom Thomson plays no instrument. He does not/sing” (17, 19). Huh? While logically, part three does not preclude part five, it makes one wonder how Tom proved his perfect pitch and what use it is if he doesn’t play.
The pivoting from logic to fancy primes the poetry in these poems, many of them sonnets, which call for turns that embody Tom Thomson’s thought process. Yet to be exact, these poems are not persona poems in the sense that the narrator speaks to us through a character’s mask. We see Tom from the safe distance of the third-person with access to his thoughts: “Now, though, fingers he/a snappy hat, and thinks to self, perhaps,/if thought they there was something underneath,/a man, a soul, not just a coat on stick” (69). And, of course, the poem is the coat over the soul of Jollimore. It’s a thick coat for a soul at the center vibrant logical activity.
Even before we meet Tom, we encounter the poet. The first poem introduces Jollimore as someone who understands form as a kind of play, especially with inner rhymes that nearly render the poem nothing more than whimsy; however, as the content of the book’s first poem redefines whippoorwill as mockingbird, Jollimore promises to loop-di-loop without jumping the tracks of logic if we keep reading. The poems that follow not only fly from "disturbing dreams" to music but often the thoughts sing while in flight.
The opening poem's transformation from whippoorwill to mockingbird and back again promises reversals in following poems like "Tom Thomson in His Library": "He has not loaned a book/to anyone for ten plus years. For no/one reads no more, and fewer people still/read what he reads..." (66). It would be easy for such hyperbole to fall into mockery, but the turns of thought in Tom Thomson--the character in 43 of these 60 poems--reveal a mind that contemplates itself as levelly as it contemplates its surroundings. For those of us who like to read, Jollimore presents a humbling experience of Thomson contemplating his books that smell of “drenched dead flames” (66).
So was the fire in the living the life written about? In thinking about writing? In writing the life? These are poems that raise questions, the voltas coming not only within the sonnets but between the poems in the book. The ideas turn in the poems and keep them burning, as if doubt is a fuel that will not be exhausted by scarce conclusions. The survival of Thomson’s clarity of mind amidst all this is not so much superhuman as it is humanly inspiring.
We formally meet Tom Thomson in the third poem of the book, “Trout Quintet.” He lives in a superhuman place and does superhuman things, so I can’t stop watching this enigma. In part three of the quintet, “He has perfect pitch,” but in part five, “Tom Thomson plays no instrument. He does not/sing” (17, 19). Huh? While logically, part three does not preclude part five, it makes one wonder how Tom proved his perfect pitch and what use it is if he doesn’t play.
The pivoting from logic to fancy primes the poetry in these poems, many of them sonnets, which call for turns that embody Tom Thomson’s thought process. Yet to be exact, these poems are not persona poems in the sense that the narrator speaks to us through a character’s mask. We see Tom from the safe distance of the third-person with access to his thoughts: “Now, though, fingers he/a snappy hat, and thinks to self, perhaps,/if thought they there was something underneath,/a man, a soul, not just a coat on stick” (69). And, of course, the poem is the coat over the soul of Jollimore. It’s a thick coat for a soul at the center vibrant logical activity.
Even before we meet Tom, we encounter the poet. The first poem introduces Jollimore as someone who understands form as a kind of play, especially with inner rhymes that nearly render the poem nothing more than whimsy; however, as the content of the book’s first poem redefines whippoorwill as mockingbird, Jollimore promises to loop-di-loop without jumping the tracks of logic if we keep reading. The poems that follow not only fly from "disturbing dreams" to music but often the thoughts sing while in flight.
The opening poem's transformation from whippoorwill to mockingbird and back again promises reversals in following poems like "Tom Thomson in His Library": "He has not loaned a book/to anyone for ten plus years. For no/one reads no more, and fewer people still/read what he reads..." (66). It would be easy for such hyperbole to fall into mockery, but the turns of thought in Tom Thomson--the character in 43 of these 60 poems--reveal a mind that contemplates itself as levelly as it contemplates its surroundings. For those of us who like to read, Jollimore presents a humbling experience of Thomson contemplating his books that smell of “drenched dead flames” (66).
So was the fire in the living the life written about? In thinking about writing? In writing the life? These are poems that raise questions, the voltas coming not only within the sonnets but between the poems in the book. The ideas turn in the poems and keep them burning, as if doubt is a fuel that will not be exhausted by scarce conclusions. The survival of Thomson’s clarity of mind amidst all this is not so much superhuman as it is humanly inspiring.
August 11, 2012
Last night I sat quietly and listened to Troy Jollimore read from Tom Thomson in Purgatory. A private reading for a select audience in a private home. In a room with blue walls full of art and intelligence. Poetry for god's sake. Me. I hate poetry. I tried to distract myself by searching for flaws in the paint, any imperfection in the perfect edge of blue wall against ceiling white. Or was it yellow? I can't remember. I think it was the instruction that "moss grows most full and bright on the side of the tree that faces the nearest major urban area." You shit Troy Jollimore. You made me listen. To poetry. Good God. Even worse I bought the book. How will I ever recover?
Read
July 29, 2013A poetry collection lent to me that was recommended as a "starter" book for grasping poetry. I won't lie and say I understood it all, but I did have an emotion response to some of the lines (I like equating fishing to solitaire). I don't know if it was the author's intent, but his fictional Tom Thomson was formed in my head (against the historical Thomson). It convinced me to read more poetry, so I guess it is a success. :)
October 27, 2008
Like a cross between Yoda and John Berryman's Henry from The Dream Songs. I liked it, maybe b/c I like John Berryman & Yoda (altho I do get weary after awhile)
October 21, 2009
Tom Thomson is so smart.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews