Not all poetry has to be heavy and dark and stormy and stressful.

It can be light and boyant and playful and inventive, too. Critics get down on Silly Billy for his apparent friviolity, which is really only in surface and style.

He's pretty mad, bad, and dangerous to know if you take another look.

He has this gracefulness with language and pacing and statement, it really is limpid, like Updike says on the back. Unpretentious and consistenly lovely and self-deprecating while tackling real meaty issuesthat keep philosophers drunk and desperate and depressed.

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins is a solid collection that captures his unique voice. Collins mixes humor with heartfelt moments, making his poems feel like genuine conversations. He has a knack for finding meaning in the everyday, and you can’t help but relate to his observations. It’s an enjoyable read that brings poetry down to earth, perfect for anyone looking to dive into something real and accessible.

Billy Collins poetry is quirky and wildly amusing. It’s almost as though he didn’t receive the memo that poetry should be stuffy and pretentious.

I gave this book three separate sittings and though I did enjoy reading it, I could not shake the feeling that Collins is a bit too straightforward. I understand his widespread appeal - he makes poetry manageable, accessible, easy - but I think he does so at some expense. Critics quoted in the front of the book described his "irresistable charm" - but I think that a great deal of that charm is not so much the sublimeness of his poems, but the fact that nearly every person on earth - secretly, deep down - wants to be a poet and the ease and simplicity of Collins' poems make them think that maybe their own writings are worth a little more than they ever supposed. It is no doubt a good thing that he has - I'm sure - inspired many tobegin reading poetry or to even begin taking more seriously their own writing.

I also felt, though, that his own voice - his ego - was ever-present and much too loud. He strikes me as the type that is quite enamored with himself and I think that that is part of why his storylines felt so overt to me.

All in all - it is merely a matter of personal preference. I can appreciate his meter and the unquestionable strength of his creativity. He can take the mundane and banal and send them off into some other realm that is full of imagination and fantasy. And he makes the trip fun. But it felt a little like the science fiction form of poetry - and science fiction is something for which I've never been able to acquire a taste.

Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

This is an excellent “greatest hits” of Collins poetry, which is at times humorous, at times poignant, while always remaining accessible. His poems make me want to write my own poems immediately after I finish them.


This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

The first anthology I ever read straight through...this collection solidified my love of poetry. Billy Collins puts ordinary language to ordinary things and somehow produces an extraordinary result.

Well, I’ve skipped books on poetry for 30+ years and this book made me feel like a fool for doing so

Billy Collins has always been one of my favourite poets for his minimalist style, clever turns of wit, and thoughtful concepts. And so, I'm happy to report that this collection has not failed to succeed the others in making me laugh, think, and cry.

For years, I have steered clear of poetry. I have never liked it. I never understood it. Back in 2018, I decided to try reading poetry again, and came across Billy Collins. Collins' work may be the first poems (other than Shel Silverstein) that I've actually enjoyed and helped me to understand why the medium of poetry exists in the first place. "Sailing Alone Around the Room" contains several works that, as a non-poetry reader, I understood and enjoyed. I thought of this book as a "gateway" into poems and how to read them. I didn't understand every poem, but overall I'm glad I picked up this book and I'm glad I made myself read through the entire thing. If you are interested in trying to understand poetry, and do not like poetry, this is a book for you.

I just really enjoy Billy Collins'dry wit and way with words. But here is my favorite Billy Collins poem (not, alas, included in this book, but it will give you a nice taste of his work).

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)

A quick read, read in two days, yet I tried my best to rush it, because this was good. A collection of poems from earlier collections with new batch added at the end, this book has poems of various moods, some of which may appear in the same poem, changing the feeling at some point(s).

There's many with everyday-life feel in them, yet some go beyond and turn things around deliciously. They're often funny too; I didn't find anything too-heavy within.

The author doesn't write his poems too heavily-laden, which has stopped me reading some poets, nor is the language too tied up to read in the evening when mind isn't at its sharpest focus anymore.

"Vade Mecum"
I want the scissors to be very sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

I haven't read his stuff before, but I have a feeling I've read "The Dead" somewhere before, some anthology I guess. These poems have often lots of nature bits going on, themes whirling around the author's home, and the family dog entering the poems now and then. Also, tea and mornings. :)

Favorites: "Questions About Angels", "Forgetfulness", "Canada", "My Heart", "Center", "Piano Lessons", "Nightclub", "Morning", "Shoveling Snow With Buddha", "Japan", "Passengers", "Aristotle", "Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles", "The Waitress" and "Man Listening To Disc".

I guess I bumped into this book here, though which friend it was (or 'readers also enjoyed' part may have hinted at it, too), I don't know. But in any case, this was a good purchase, and very recommendable; not too thick nor too heavy poetry-wise :)