Product Description

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7390 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-17
• Released on: 2002-09-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This collection hit the front page of the New York Times its first time out of the blocks in 1999, as the University of Pittsburgh Press, Collins's longtime publisher, denied Random the rights to the poems as the poet tried to jump ship. The two houses and Collins's agent, Chris Calhoun (Dan Menaker is Collins's editor at Random), later worked out a deal that gave Pitt a few more months to ride Picnic, Lightning (1998) and Collins's other books without this culling treading on its sales. As it now appears, the book includes 23 poems from Picnic, more than from any of Collins's previous three books included here. (Work from the early Video Poems and Pokerface is absent.) Collins's poems are generally conveyed by a speaker whose genial, highly literate analogue of earnestness perfectly produces inchoate quotidian restlessness matched by fear-based appreciation of the mundane. A typical Collins poem begins with "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer," "The way the dog trots out the front door" or the observation that "It is possible to be struck by a meteor/ or a single-engine plane/ while reading in a chair at home" and continues by juxtaposing, say, close descriptions of "the instant hand of Death" and "the rasp of the steel edge/ against a round stone,/ the small plants singing/ with lifted faces." It's a formula that has worked well for Collins, and he does not abandon it in the 20 new poems here. (On-sale date: Sept. 11) Forecast: A reading on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion was the beginning of serious sales for Picnic, Lightning (40,000 copies and counting), while The Art of Drowning has sold 26,000 since 1995, and Questions About Angels clocks in at 21,000 since 1991. Collins's reading tours for this book should help reach even more readers, and some browsers may remember the Times story.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This new volume from the newly appointed poet laureate of the United States has survived the publishing rights war between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press. The wait has been well worth it. The surface structure of these poems appears simplistic, but subtle changes in tone or gesture move the reader from the mundane to the sublime. In an attempt to sleep, the speaker in "Insomnia" moves from counting sheep to envisioning Noah's arc to picturing "all the fish in creation/ leaping a fence in a field of water,/ one colorful species after another." Collins will tackle any topic: his subject matter varies from snow days to Aristotle to forgetfulness. The results are accessible but not trite, comical but not laughable, and well crafted but not overly flamboyant. Collins relies heavily on imagery, which becomes the cornerstone of the entire volume, and his range of diction brings such a polish to these poems that the reader is left feeling that this book "once opened, can never be closed." This volume belongs in everyone's library; highly recommended. Tim Gavin, Episcopa Acad., Merion, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Collins, that rarest of creatures, a truly popular living poet, is currently poet laureate, an appointment well celebrated with this fertile gathering of nearly 100 poems--20 newly minted, the others selected from four earlier volumes, including Picnic, Lightning (1998). On every delectable page, Collins performs nimble feats of the imagination and gives voice to an emotion we foolishly trivialize and condemn: pure pleasure. Nurturing a childlike love and talent for make-believe, he enters the landscape of a Hudson River painting; offers funny takes on history; writes lovingly of dogs, music, cups of tea, and books; and sees everything as a living entity, from a piano to a calendar pinup to the dawn. But what appears to be whimsy is, in fact, a graceful and ongoing inquiry into the nature of being. Mischievous and deeply attentive, inventive and grateful, Collins moves stealthily toward the essentials, quietly celebrating the simple and reflective life and gently reminding readers to respect and treasure our species' tenuous place on the great thrumming web of life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Unexpected, funny, exquisite
"Sailing Alone Around the Room" is so unexpected and funny and poignant and even exquisite. Collins' poems involve you like Alice when she stepped through the looking glass or fell down the rabbit's hole. And you're so comfortable, and the adventure is so real you don't want to leave. It's like being picked up in a three-wheeled tempo and carted off to places you hadn't thought to go, yet places you recognize when you arrive.

Are the new poems worth buying the volume?
In Billy Collins book "Sailing Around the Room", he brings together poems from "The Apple That Astonished Paris", "Questions About Angels", "The Art of Drowning" and "Picnic, Lightning" along with twenty new poems. Mainstream critics give wide acclaim for his poetry, so the remaining question is whether or not his new poems measured up to the status of Laureate.

In the new poems Collins retains the same conversational tone as his previous work. Collins also continues to poke fun at elitist critics with his reverence for the simple and straightforward in "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles". He refers to elitism as an iron turnstile to be pushed at (not everyone can gain admittance), and gives a made-up title of "Vortex on a String" which is a concept in superconductivity. The other title which he mentions in the poem is "Horn of Neurosis", quite possibly a psychological one. Poetry does not have to be this complicated. Collins pays homage to Chinese poetry, which focuses on simple concrete imagery, and wants to learn more about it.

A critical difference in his previous poetry and the new entries is the amount of explanation included. He explains his images more in the new poems through sparse commentary, and gives a greater insight into how he perceives certain objects, animals, people or situations. For instance, in "Dharma", his dog is to be envied or admired for the simplistic life that only people as great as Gandhi and Thoreau have achieved. Contrast this with another dog poem, "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" from "The Apple That Astonished Paris", where the dog is not his own. All we know about the dog is that it barks. We don't know why it barks, if the owners are cruel, we just know that it barks. There is distance here, a lack of personal connection. Although Collins has written personally in other poems, the personal reflections in these new poems are more front and center.

So if you liked Collins previous work, "Sailing Alone Around the Room" will not disappoint. The twenty new poems make the book worthwhile to purchase. For fans that are missing a book or two, this makes an excellent choice for a varied collection.

http://drtucker.blogspot.com/2007/05/horn-player-neurosis.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVJ-3TCP3FK-27&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2834c1cfd4a7138ad62a5138a4dac41c

Dhyana, Yoga and Billy Collins
The transience of moments is often the subject of inquiry by artists, philosophers, and scientists alike. It is the central focus of the system of thought behind what is called here in the West as "yoga". For a yoga practitioner, Billy Collin's verse would qualify as a potential source of "bliss". Sitting with my legs uncrossed and firmly at the foot of an plush arm chair - I take a break from the Eastern asceticism to enter into Collin's world. Pleasure was the outcome when a particular moment in Collin's verse activated all the "chakras" that purportedly lie along my spine and analogous to the Western concept of "mind, body and soul"; transcending time and space. And Billy Collins does this all with wry wit and a ironic sense of humor. Often musing on scenes from the past (I guess that's the constraint of the arm chair! : "Nostalgia", "The Waitress", "Splitting Wood") and some topics waxing on the philosophical ("The Butterfly Effect" - which deals with certain actions and their resulting outcomes). The verse, depending on the reader's cultural background (think like a White Anglo Saxon Protestant for maximum effect) in an optimal situation (kids asleep, tv off) will resonate in all yogic "chakras". Try this with Milton's "Paradise Lost" which I long abandoned as culturally and historically inaccessible - at least from a casual reader's perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed and was at some points - profoundly moved by Billy Collin's anthology: "Sailing Around The Room".