Then someone suggested I give Billy Collins a try, so I invested $20+ on his recent collection entitled "Sailing Around the Room." (mostly poems from his prior collections, but with twenty or so new ones).

What can I say? In the two days since I bought this volume, I've read each of the poems several times. Collins is humorous, insightful, and even his ambiguities are delicious. But beneath the humor lies some deep insights into humanity, a sense of sadness amid our passage through life (the last lines in "November" are heartbreaking). Many of his poems are wry commentaries on the creative process.

If you've ever owned a dog, his "Dharma" is a revelation, you'll gain a new appreciation for snow from reading "Snow" or "Snow Day," you'll never look at someone listening to a disc player the same way after you've read "Man Listening to Disc," and you'll never pick up a Victoria's Secret catalog again without examining it through the humorous eyes of "Victoria's Secret."

I loved this volume and I'll read it over and over. It's everything I have described above, but above all things, it's wise. Collins has enough of life under his belt to understand its humor, its tragedy, its joy, and its rhythms. And he has the voice to make it all real for the reader.

Even if you hate poetry, buy this book.


Quirky poetry.   October 9, 2001
 28 out of 31 found this review helpful

Billy Collins is an English professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also the 2001-2002 Poet Laureate of the United States. This 96-poem collection is the definitive volume of Billy Collins' work to date. It includes selected poetry from his four previous books, THE APPLE THAT ASTONISHED PARIS, QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS, THE ART OF DROWNING, and PICNIC, LIGHTNING (1988-1998), together with twenty new poems. It is a captivating collection of poetry that I enjoyed reading cover to cover.

Quirky. Wry. Amazing. Fun. Witty. Easy. These are some of the words that describe Collins' poetry. He has a knack for revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. In "Questions About Angels," he writes, "Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?/ Do they swing like children from the hinges/ of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?/ Do they sit alone in gardens changing colors?" (p. 24). In "The Dead," he observes, "The dead are always looking down on us, they say,/ while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,/ They are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven/ as they row themselves slowly through eternity" (p. 33). "Each one is a gift, no doubt," he writes in "Days," "mysteriously placed in your waking hand/ or set upon your forehead/ moments before you open your eyes" (p. 57). In one of my favorite Collins' poems, "Dharma," he writes, "The way the dog trots out the front door/ every morning/ without a hat or an umbrella/ without any money/ or the keys to her doghouse/ never fails to fill the saucer of my heart/ with milky admiration" (p. 137).

Other poems here contemplate insomnia (pp. 10; 142), Collins' "best cigarette" (p. 55), marginalia (p. 94), shovelling snow with Buddha (p. 103), perusing a Victoria's Secret catalog (p. 109), and undressing Emily Dickinson (p. 119). Those readers who appreciate good wine, good books, and good jazz will discover a kindred spirit in Billy Collins. Perhaps Collins describes the effect of reading his poetry best in "Picnic, Lightning": "It is possible to be struck by a meteor/ or a single-engine plane/ while reading in a chair at home" (p. 98).

G. Merritt


This Is Guy Is The Real Thing, I Kid You Not...   October 11, 2001
 24 out of 33 found this review helpful

Billy Collins is a poet of body and soul, someone who knows the bite and pleasure of a turn of phrase that enlivens like a shot of pretty-good Irish whisky. "American" is too narrow a designation for poems whose aim is to direct us to the truly human--the whimsical and the sorrowful, the oddly-tough animal underlying that humanity. For those who, like Collins, have the mantle and designation of "master poet" bestowed upon them repeatedly the trick is to earn that praise. Billy Collins has certainly earned whatever well-intentioned men and women may say of him, especially the good: his is a finely honed voice and, at times, that voice wickers into a wonderfully quirky track of experience that never excludes the accidental and fleeting. One cannot say enough about such good and decent men, or their works.


Refreshingly devoid of tweed and pomp   September 15, 2001
 18 out of 22 found this review helpful

If you haven't bought a book of poetry in a while (or, perhaps, ever), Billy Collins's most recent collection is a good choice. His poems are unfailingly accessible and entertaining, so easy to read they make poetry look as if it's easy to write. Collins abhors lofty, incomprehensible verse and yet manages to reconcile his down home persona with an obvious love of good wine, good jazz, and reference books of varying sizes. I'm off now to the park with my dog, my coffee, and my copy of Billy Collins.


It gets better   December 6, 2001
 14 out of 19 found this review helpful

I am a voracious reader of contemporary poetry, but I have never previously been interested in Collins's work, which has seemed to me more or less insignifant. I read this book after he became Poet Laureate, and although I don't hate it, it's not exactly earth-shattering either. I suppose that's the point: Collins wants to be charming and minor, and he's both to a tee. His best poems riff on some well-known idea (like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin) and then kind of get distracted by an image. By associative logic, the poems veer off their own path -- which is often pretty well-trodden -- and into more mysterious and interesting territory. This often works as a technique, although it gets predictable. And Collins is funny, which is a big plus. I tended not to mind that he didn't really have much significant to say. This is poetry as beach reading.

One thing about Collins's technique: you can see Collins's ear getting better in the later books. The first 50 pages or so are just unmelodious, ugly even, and I don't think it's really purposeful. In the later books he gets more comfortable with his breezy sentences and takes more chances with the line. It's not like he's ever a poet of much risk, but the phrasing is (usually) not dull or flat in the later books.