Product Description

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. To celebrate his years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce these special, limited editions, in hardcover, of the book that helped establish and secure his reputation during the 1990s. Collin's poetry has been described by Gerald Stern as "heartbreakingly beautiful." Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims of these poems: "consistently starling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the world that are and were and some others besides." Everyone has a favorite Collins poem, whether it is his resigned meditation on "Forgetfulness" (Questions About Angels, 1991), his affectinate riff on his mechanic's calendars in "Pinup" (The Art of Drowning, 1995), his delight in "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" (Picnic, Lightning, 1998), or any number of others about his dog; listening to jazz, or wondering whether the "Three Blind Mice" suffer from a congenital condition or were all caught in a fireworks explosion. The Washington Post declares Collins to be in possession of "one of the richest imagination around." Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth time, these books are must-haves for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271465 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 91 pages

Amazon.com Review
Billy Collins has a knack for making the familiar exotic and the arcane instantly accessible. His 1991 collection, Questions About Angels, is a loving and often amused search for "the infinite / permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters." This phrase comes from an ode to his first literary experience--and needless to say, Collins is more honest than most of us might be. Though he would later discover "frightening Heathcliff" and "frightened Pip," and even Adam and Eve, fiction for him began with another famous pair: Dick and Jane. Throughout this witty volume, he explores other heroes who have expanded his vistas--including Goya, Kafka, ancient mapmakers, Constable, and more than one lexicographer in hot pursuit of le mot juste:

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country
that lie beyond speech
Noah Webster and his assistants are moving
across the landscape tracking down a new word.

Collins makes you remember your initial delight in metaphor and simile. In "The First Geniuses," for instance, he imagines an era before "the orchestra of history / has had time to warm up," before inventors and artists could quite suss out how to use their gifts:

They have yet to discover fire, much less invent the wheel,
so they wander a world mostly dark and motionless
wondering what to do with their wisdom
like young girls wonder what to do with their hair.

Though his world is heavily populated by painting and literature, several melancholy, cigarette-packed love poems make it clear that people have equal sway. Yet Collins is always intent on proving that art, too, is experience. In "Metamorphosis" he dreams of waking up as the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. "I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies. / I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face." No one should be surprised to discover that his wish was partly granted. In 1992, that institution named Collins--with a perfectly straight face?--a "Literary Lion." --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly
Smack-dab in the middle of this collection is the delightful "Purity," a poem detailing Collins's macabre writing process. On Wednesdays, in the late afternoon, the poet goes to his study and sheds his clothes. He then removes his flesh--"so that what I write will be pure, / completely rinsed of the carnal"--and takes out each of his organs so as not "to hear their ancient rhythms / when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat." "Purity" is about ideas rather than feelings, but the poet executes his metaphors with perfect precision and a bravura wit. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about most of the other poems here. Collins's images are often strange and wonderful but too frequently his poems are constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor. In "Cliche," Collins ( Pok er face ) writes about his life as "an open book," and all that we eventually end up learning is that he "loves to feel the daily turning of the pages." We can admire the scope of Collins's imagination, but his poems rarely induce an emotional reaction, precluding us from any affinity with his experience. This volume was selected by Edward Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This book, one of five winners of the 1990 National Poetry Series competition, is Collins's fourth book of poems. Unrhymed, playfully subdued in tone, and somewhat restrained by a loose hexameter line, Collins's poems might be characterized as metaphysical musings in a whimsical mode. The poet mocks human inflexibility ("the only question you ever hear is about/ the little dance floor on the head of a pin"), hankers after the American pastoral (in "American Sonnet"), and imagines being transformed by Kafka into the New York Public Library: "I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies./ I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face." Although occasionally glib or bland in themselves, these poems build upon each other, and those who read this volume from start to finish will be moved by the accumulated power of a poet who is not afraid to be alone with his imaginary, dissembling landscapes. For general and academic collections.
-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Not As Simple As It Looks
Billy Collin's poetry is complicatedly simple. That is, you read it and think, "I can write poems like this myself." Of course,most of us can't or we would take turns being poet laureate of the United States. His poems are clear and direct, like looking at the surface of a pond. The more you look, the more you see what's underneath. And his selection of subject matter is the nooks and crannies of life we often don't look in or don't think about enough to see how enriching they are.

Questions About Self
As the title suggests, this collection of fifty-four poems by the former U.S. poet laureate is wondering. Billy Collins wonders about the afterlife. He wonders about fairy tales and cliches. He wonders about dreams and literature. He wonders about discovery and extinction. And when you get through it and try to pick out a theme, Billy Collins wonders about Billy Collins.

Despite favoring free verse in his poetry, Collins has made accessibility one of the hallmarks of his poetic style. This book is no exception: it could be used in junior high classes for its lyrical clarity, and college literature seminars for its depth. In "Putti In the Night," Collins ruminates on whether those baby-faced angels in Renaissance paintings could really embody divine providence. With "The Death of Allegory," he mourns the passing of eternal verities from our consciousness, while admitting that our modern variegated way of life can't admit of an all-or-nothing sense of morality. In "Memento Mori" he speculates on whether all the tchochkes and knick-knacks he's accumulated will be able to attend his funeral.

This book isn't an unqualified success. For instance, with the poem "The Afterlife," he steps out of the role of the questioner and come up with his own answers, which are too squishy and non-committal to be substantial. In "Wonder of the World" he talks about some monumental, um, thing without bothering to name it or describe it, and he produces the same kind of adjective-rich meringue I would have written in tenth grade. And in the appropriately names "Cliche," he compares his life to a book, "outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings." Like no first-year poetry student ever thought of THAT simile before.

Still, on balance, the weak bits don't dominate. This is a good book of poetry for people who don't read poetry and for people who do, or for students who think they don't like poetry. It's light, sprightly, inquisitive. It's fun to read, and it gives you enough to think about that you'll keep coming back. Just like a book of poems should.

Accessible to the poetically challenged.
This book was a gift to me, and I am grateful to the giver.
She knows that I need stuff that makes sense!
That's one of the things I like most about this collection, it makes sense. It is accessible to the somewhat poetically challenged (as I consider myself to be). But beyond this... just the use of the words, the FIT of the words, the powerful (yet subtle) sort of surreptitious little attack in the end of each poem, always making the reader go... "Hmmm".
Collins is a wordsmith, and exquisitely so. Satisfying. He is to the typewriter what Bruce Hornsby is to the piano. You listen to both, and when they're done their thing, you say to yourself "It would be very difficult to have done that any better."

Billy Collins makes me feel like everything is a poem waiting to happen. This is because he chooses a lot of common occurrence, simple things to write about. Stuff like spending an afternoon examining ancient maps in a library while the rain falls outside. Or stopping to pick wisteria from the side of the road. Waking up with a wicked hangover. Kafka picking up a pen and promptly changing you into a goldfish or a lost mitten, or (better yet) the New York Public Library. How about having your own faithful table lamp showing up at your funeral... "like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord / the small circle of mourners parting to make room."
Wonderful stuff. Everyday stuff like that.
He's witty and terse; thematically timeless / He's all in free verse, and totally rhymeless.
4.5 exploding stars!