I had the pleasure of seeing Billy Collins read his work in 2000 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, and again, recently, at the Library of Congress' National Book Festival. Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the United States, and I thought it would be appropriate for me to review one of his past collections of poetry, The Apple That Astonished Paris.
Collins has a wonderful, dry wit that shines through many of his poems. It is even better to see Collins read his poems in person, and how he slyly deadpans his delivery of incredibly humorous statements. I highly recommmend seeing him read in person if you get the chance.
Collins has gained quite a reputation as a highly "accessible" poet, meaning that his poems appeal to a wide audience. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why he was selected to be a Poet Laureate, or poet of "the people."
To say that Collins' poems are "accessible" may seem a bit of a slight. For, while Collins' use of simple and spare language may mean the average reader won't need to go running to his or her dictionary every stanza, that is not to say his poems are pure fluff. For example, in "Flying to a Funeral," Collins captures the emotional flux caused by a death:
The night I heard the insulting facts
(18 years old, playing hockey, heart attack)
I remember leaning over in a darkening garden
to whiff, as if in his behalf, white lilac
blossoms loaded with cool evening rain,
then biting down on one hard, reeling with its taste
alive there under the low, harboring clouds.
Collins is light and playful in many of his poems. He highlights the mundane details of our lives and makes us delight in them, see them as something other than the dreariness we make them out to be. In "On Closing Anna Karenina," he writes:
It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,
I thought a Russian official would appear
to slip a medal over my lowered head
when I reached the last page.
But I found there only the last word,
a useless looking thing, stalled there,
ending its sentence and the whole book at once.
Collins is a very imaginative poet, as well. He is able to write about History as if it were a houseguest, or even write verse about "The Morning After My Death":
On the morning that follows my death, the sun
will no doubt rise through the slats of these pines
and paint its usual light on the east end of the house,
on the white garden gate and on my useless car,
unless, of course, it happens to be raining,
in which case these windows will be maps of water,
the roof will be the weather's melancholic drum
and low gray clouds will sweep over this neighborhood.
In The Apple That Astonished Paris, Billy Collins covers the standard poetic targets of love, death, and art. In between, he helps us see the universality of experience, peppering it with laughter at ourselves -- and our humanness.
