Promotional Information

From America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, this collection contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections.

About the Author

Billy Collinsis the author of twelve collections of poetry includingThe Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, andPicnic, Lightning. He is also the editor ofPoetry 180- A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More- Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, andBright Wings- An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.

Reviews

“What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment.”
—The New Yorker

“It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”
—The New York Review of Books

“A brilliant comic sally...a wonderful, sly, and moving collection.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“[Collins] takes the mundane thing and shows you its mystery. And he takes the mysterious and strips it naked.”
—The Washington Post

"What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment."
-The New Yorker

"It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment."
-The New York Review of Books

"A brilliant comic sally...a wonderful, sly, and moving collection."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"[Collins] takes the mundane thing and shows you its mystery. And he takes the mysterious and strips it naked."
-The Washington Post

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 Cahners Business Information.