iconic. incredible. i want to sit by a window on a fall morning with a coffee and read billy collins until i die.

Very good and satisfying book of poetry. Excellent.

I am a book addict. I own thousands of them. They fill most rooms of my house, many closets, my garage. They are stacked high by my bedside, on the hamper in the upstairs bathroom, in the backseat of my car. I take a book with me most places I go. I buy books all the time but I have gotten a little less self-indulgent in my buying habits; I almost never buy hardback and I never ever buy full-price. Probably the next lesson I should learn in my book buying habits is never buy while partially or fully inebriated.

I bought this book after I had three pints of Guinness and an Irish Car Bomb at my office Christmas Party. Basically, I didn’t want to drive home shit-faced so I ambled over from the BJ’s Pizzeria to the mall across the parking lot. They had a fairly big B. Dalton there which happened to be going out of business. I’m going to miss all the mall book stores, they were charmless and empty of any idiosyncrasy in taste or selection but they were bookstores damn it and that beats any teen clothing shop or boutique that will take their places.

So, I’m a little buzzed and the books are all forty percent off. Two criteria for book purchasing together at once; I guarantee I’m going to walk out of there with something. I must’ve perused those aisles for forty frigging minutes, I swear to frigging God. It was like the bookstore of the damned. Every section was filled with the most obvious, trite and commercial books you can imagine. I guess my drunken fingers probably picked up a few gems, my addled brain read a few lines worthy of a sparked interest, but I couldn’t come across that one grailic purchase that combined the right price, readability and sexiness of design. Finally, when I was about ready to piss out the last of my Jamison’s and Guinness I stumbled across the most chicken shit little poetry section this side of George W. Bush’s personal library. And I grabbed Billy Collins. And it was not the road less taken. And it was not money well-spent. And, lamentably, it was not returnable.

I would’ve been better off going to the food court and downing a chili dog or a basket of fries. Clogging my arteries, torquing my bowels and earning the disapprobation of my vegetarian buddies; I would’ve been better of going to Old Navy and getting a sweater that frays after three washes. As my two year old son, Brendan, has been known to say(and do), Billy Collins is ‘yucky poo poo.’

I read poetry for a number of reasons and expect a number of things from it. I read it because I think that repeated exposure to rhythmic and metrical finesse will help me in my own halting attempts to develop some music with my writing. I read it because at its best poetry can reduce a particular event, thought or sentiment to the bones, to the bare mineral soil, to the most basic irreducible element of a thing and thusly reflect that thing back to you in a wholly new light, empty of previous associations and mental baggage. Sometimes poetry can be visionary, suffusing the everyday with a sense of the sacred and ineffable through metrical beauty, dream-like imagery and an attempt to wrestle that ultimate Will-O-Wisp, God, onto the stage and into the conversation. Rumi does this and Blake, Yeats at his best and Ginsberg when he wasn’t being phallocentric. There are other great poets, Mary Oliver, Heaney and Ted Hughes whose understanding, embrace and keen observation of the natural world brings another kind of sacred to the forefront. The beauty, strangeness, repellent aliveness and tutelary function of our animal brothers and sisters and the sublime terror of the belching, barking flame-cored earth itself.

Collins succeeds on none of these levels. His poetry does possess a certain craft, the art of a man who has obviously honed his style over the years. But the style is boring, empty of technical innovation. His subject matters are worse, he uses events of the daily, mundane and suburban nature and then fails repeatedly, sometimes even in a single poem, to say anything interesting, to say it in an interesting manner or to offer anything resembling a coherent and unique world view. It’s like reading USA Today in stanza form. Page, after tortuous page, it continues. I tried like hell to find some poem I loved here, some sort of glimmer of a deeper world or verbal pyrotechnics that offered some vestige of joy, but nothing.

He is the former Poet Laureate of the United States. During the Bush Administration. Perfectly fitting in its way, a poet of a time of the devalued tongue and the age of advertising and double speak. Unmitigated crap. Joyless and empty of anything other than the immediate moment, firmly ensconced in the values, insights and aesthetics of its day.

You may already know that my enjoyment with much of Collins’ poetry is immense. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
To quote myself: “Collins elevates the commonplace and calls our attention to the details of life. He "rescues" these "from the millions that rush out of sight." For me, that is a very special gift.”
In this collection, there are many gems of observation but also some consideration of the work process of the poet. I didn’t mind either focus.

I wanted this review to include what I found best, but the longer poems are too long. Can we both be satisfied with the following?

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

The Rival Poet
The column of your book titles,
always introducing your latest one,
looms over me like Roman architecture.

It is longer than the name
of an Italian countess, longer
than this poem will probably be.

Etched on the head of a pin,
my own production would leave room for
The Lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.
No matter.

In my revenge daydream I am the one
poised on the marble staircase
high above the crowded ballroom.
A retainer in livery announces me
and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella
Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.

You are the one below
fidgeting in your rented tux
with some local Cindy hanging all over you.

Most every public library has a copy. So, go treat yourself. 4.5*

My philosophically minded friends and I have a debate about Billy Collins' poetry. They insist that the attempt to chronicle the everyday in a meaningful way can be done in a deeper, more profound manner. They find Collins lacking in this way. This is probably true, but not Collins' main point, I think.
Still, I think, after rereading this book, that Collins becomes more profound with time. I am still unsure if this is my projection into the poem because I *want* these poems to be more profound or not. Nonetheless, I can't help liking so much of what he writes here, even if it can be rightly said, as my aforementioned friends insist, that some of these poems are thin on theme.
Anyway, here's a lovely image that closes the poem 'Bar Time':

No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives
from tending the small fire of a cigarette,
from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,
the cold rust I am sipping,

or from having an eye on the street outside
when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,
rain runing off the brim of his hat,
the late edition like a flag in his pocket.

Very refreshing to read.
Billy Collins has a unique view of the world and its nice to immerse yourself in his poetry to open your mind up.
Highly recommend.

Collins’ poetry is straightforward and self-aware and sometimes you need that.

‘I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in the book you always carry.’

Billy Collins, the American Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, is a poet whom you really always keep with you. The man is a pure shot of brilliance; his serene and seemingly effortless prose will seduce your intellect and make sweet, playful love to your soul. This particular collection serves as an early ‘best of’ and would make a perfect introduction to Collins. If you have yet to read his works, I would like to take this opportunity to direct you  here. It is well worth your time, even if you don’t typically like poetry as Collins writes in such an accessible manner that reading his poems are as simple and refreshing as breathing the clean morning air. Also, this Selected Works slim size (192pgs dripping wet) is deceiving of the momentous achievements sequestered beneath the covers. Often quite funny and whimsical, yet also tender, sentimental and enduring, Billy Collins is absolutely incredible and I cannot help but fall into superlative clichés in crying my love for his simple poetry from atop this Goodreads mountain.

New York native Collins is a highly decorated poet, and quite deservingly so. His works represent such an insightful ‘slice-of-life’, if you will, that cuts to the core of what it is to be a functioning lover of the arts in this day and age. From ‘buzzing around the house on espresso’ to chopping onions, Collins provides an accessible, ‘everyday man’ voice that makes it easy to seek a warm shelter in like a snug sweater. He has such a love of words and books that really resonated well with me. His thoughts on writing in the margins, something I take pleasure in, really made me laugh (this stanza is for you Mike P):

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

This is not a collection to read if you are trying to quit smoking cigarettes however, as he makes them sound so damn appealing in a large variety of poems. Take these last few stanza’s of The Best Cigarette for example:
n  

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

n

I can’t express more how much I love his poems. I feel like a teenager with experience their first debilitating crush when I flip through these pages. How can you not fall in love with words all over again after reading such a joyous, hopeful poem about bars as this:
n  

In keeping with universal saloon practice,
the clock here is set 15 minutes ahead
of all the clocks in the outside world.
This makes us a rather advanced group,
doing our drinking in the unknown future,
immune from the cares of the present,
safely harbored a quarter of an hour
beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.
No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives
from tending the small fire of a cigarette,
from observing this class of whiskey and ice,
the cold rust I am sipping,
or from having an eye on the street outside
when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,
rain running off the brim of his hat,
the late edition like a flag in his pocket

n

Goddamn. I say Goddamn! (Picture for a moment that I am Uma Thurman and these poems are all cut and lined up on a table. Weak joke, I know).

But really, read this amazing shit:
n  

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.
But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.

n


Are you not impressed?! (Be glad I’m shite at photoshop or you’d be looking at Billy Collins face super imposed on Russell Crowe right now)

Collins is a joy. He makes turning 10 into a tearjerker of a milestone. He shows you the full moon as ‘ a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy, his round mouth open as if he had just broken into song’. He makes NOT going on a vacation or not fishing on the Susquehanna in July seem fun. And he dazzles with every word. And most importantly, he wrote THIS:

n  

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

n

That was the sound of your mind orgasm. Read Billy Collins.
4/5

This came highly recommended from both Stephen and Scott. If you ever need to find some great poets, I highly recommend raiding  Scott's  'read' list.

I love most of the poems in the "New Poems" section, most of which I'd read in another volume. The self-aware "Sonnet" is wonderful, with a hilarious turn at the end. In the previous collections, I didn't remember reading "Aristotle," which is the Poetics version of "Sonnet;" "Victoria's Secret," which you have a pretty good idea of already, and the ever-relevant "Introduction to Poetry."

A really lovely collection of contemporary poetry. Collins uses words beautifully, turning the ordinary into something worth taking a second look at.

I took Billy Collin’s writing and reading poetry masterclass and I absolutely adored this, many new favourite poems, some of which were hilarious. So much wit and elegance and charm. I will be reading all of his poetry eventually — he’s entered that club in my head.

the lanyard



The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room
bouncing from typewriter to piano
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past.
A past where I sat at a workbench
at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.
A gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.
Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.
But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand
again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard.
"Here are thousands of meals" she said,
"and here is clothing and a good education."
"And here is your lanyard," I replied,
"which I made with a little help from a counselor."
"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered.
"And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp."
"And here," I wish to say to her now,
"is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even."

(billy collins)