Questions About Angels

by Billy Collins

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 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

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

Genres: Poetry, American, Humor, School, Adult, Fiction, Anthologies

91 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not much of a poetry reader, but I do like a few of the more "accessible " poets, and Billy Collins seems to think like I do. My two favorites in this collection were First Reader, an ode to the Dick and Jane books many of us are so familiar with.

"It was always Saturday and he and she
we're always pointing at something and shouting, 'Look!' "

The other one was Reading Myself to Sleep.

"Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page"

I defy you to to define it any better. That's what I love about Billy Collins, he says what I can't say poetically, and has me nodding my head, saying "exactly".

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to try out Billy Collins after I enjoyed one of his poems in Good Poems for Hard Times. I wish my poetry journey had started here, I really do. Why do teachers make young learners struggle with John Donne and George Herbert when there is something accessible and relatable right here? It's like starting kids off with The Metamorphosis instead of The Cat in the Hat and then being surprised you don't have lifelong readers.

Ranting aside, I found Collins' poetry to be in very accessible language while still managing to be very moving. This is a thing that still startles me about poetry, the abrupt evocation of feelings. In just a few lines Collins can express a feeling you've struggled to pin down for years.

Some of the light-hearted poems got a genuine laugh out of me (The Hunt, The Discovery of Scat), and one even squeezed some tears out of something I thought I was ok with (The Wires of the Night). Another had me eagerly googling self-portraits of dead European painters (Candle Hat). All this variety from one volume. I loved it.

My other favorites:
First Reader
Forgetfulness
Mappamundi
The Afterlife
Purity
Memento Mori
Weighing the Dog

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never be ashamed of kindergarten—
it is the alphabet's only temple.
—"Instructions to the Artist," pp.54-55

Billy Collins is apparently something of a big deal. Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2001 to 2003. Frequent guest on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Subject of a documentary film in 2003 as well. Even so, I can't recall ever having run into Collins' work before reading Questions about Angels. Of course, I must also concede, and not for the first time, that poetry isn't really my thing, even though I've committed a verse or two myself—poetry (especially modern poetry) is almost always too allusive, too elusive, to engage me fully, and sometimes, when I actually see how the trick was done, I feel a little cheated anyway. But my friend Kim passed this book on to me, so I thought I would at least give it a try.

I read Questions about Angels slowly, with pauses for reflection between each piece. This book lends itself well to such a reading. The individual poems, having no overarching theme, resonated best for me when each had its own space.

I did have some questions about Questions about Angels, and a few quibbles. One issue was structural: the physical format of this volume just doesn't mesh well with the lengths of the works within it. Many of Collins' poems end up being about a page and a half long, and are printed so they spill over from the front of the page to its back—like pouring too many words into too small a bucket, needlessly breaking up their flow and sometimes making it unclear where a poem ends.

The poems themselves are also sometimes... unreflective about gender, let's say, in a way that I think was already becoming difficult to sustain even as far back as 1999, when this edition of Questions about Angels was published. The pronouns Collins uses in "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" (pp.17-18), for example, are uniformly masculine, until the final stanza, when "History"—a personage to whom no specific works of English Literature may be attributed—is allowed to appear, "holding her allegorical tools" while in "immaculate" garments. (Admittedly, much of this masculine musk is just what's wafting from the subject—the "Major Authors Edition" that I just looked through to check features not one female author in its 2,653 pages.) But that does not explain why the prehistoric geniuses in "The First Genius" (pp.31-32) are all "Gaunt, tall and bearded, as you might expect," nor why they go around "wondering what to do with their wisdom/like young girls wonder what to do with their hair." Nor is it clear why "Going out for Cigarettes" (pp. 37-38) stays so silent about the family its subject left behind. To me, today, these choices seem myopic.

As a quibbler by nature, I also noticed a few word choices (only a few, though!) with which I would argue. In "A History of Weather" (pp.5-6), Collins writes of "candid sunlight/elucidating the air"—where "elucidating" seems both needlessly elevated and too on-the-nose, the kind of choice I (no Poet Laureate) might make. And why say, in "The Last Man on Earth" (p.51), "in the style/of dirigibles"? The polysyllabic ungainliness of "in the style of" does not seem to be needed for its syllable count.

On the other hand, I really liked the phrase "argument of corridors" from the penultimate poem, "English Country House" (pp.88-89).

Overall, the works in Questions about Angels (with a few exceptions, mostly later in the book) came across as staid and unadventurous to me—prosaic, even. But "Forgetfulness" (pp.20-21), though, the one that ends the first section—that one hit home: "The name of the author is the first to go"...

The shorter poems impressed me more, in general. "The Dead", for example, who "are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven" (p.35). "Field Guide" (p.44), as it wonders about a pretty purple flower. "The Man in the Moon" (p.47). "Memento Mori" (p.50), which evoked in my mind the animate appliances from Thomas M. Disch's brilliant little fable, The Brave Little Toaster. The circumstances in which I read "Weighing the Dog" (p.56) added some impact, I'm sure—I was actually sitting in a veterinarian's office while Collins reminded me that the best way to weigh a wriggling animal is this: hold the animal and step on the scales yourself, then weigh yourself without the pet, and subtract. "The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography" (p.67) lived up to its wry title. And I remember the feverish dream of "Saturday Morning" (p.71) from my own childhood illnesses.

There were some exceptions to that "shorter is better" impression, too. The palpable panic in "The Wires of the Night" (pp.58-59) affected me much as it must have affected a sleepless Collins. The well-meaning censorship in "The History Teacher" (pp.77-78), teaching children that "The War of the Roses took place in a garden," was a chilling indictment. And "The Willies" (pp.83-84) really was playful—antic, even—in its exploration of synonyms for those creepy feelings of unease that everyone gets, now and then.

So... in retrospect, Collins' poems do seem to have given me a lot to say, after all. It would appear that they have done their jobs—however much of a job we can ask any hard-working poem to hold down.

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big fun!
Recommended.

[Billy Jepma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We die only when we run out of footprints."

This might be one of my most favorite books of poetry. Billy Collins is a gift.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

This superb poetry collection has been the fourth I've read from my favourite poet Billy Collins. Looking forward to reading more of his collections.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whimsy is a good word to apply to Collins' work. The world amuses him. He wallows in life's innumerable twists and turns. I think I've mentioned before how much charm his sense of humor lends to his poetry. It's this that makes the reader smile with pleasure at reading a poem about a jazz combo impatient at the lateness of the hour as an angel is intent on dancing on the head of a pin forever. I laughed at Jack's wish to write his love a letter of apology from the top of the beanstalk. His imagining what it'd be like if Kafka changed him into the New York Public Library made me smile. Collins is deceptively unadorned. These little whimseys seem slight but lead you to reflection or to revelation. His work seems personal but its solicitudes include the reader in its poetic embrace to say we're all in this together, we see it the same way, we sing the same song. The poetry of Billy Collins never fails to make my day brighter.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't been into reading poetry since I outgrew Shel Silverstein. Billy Collins is fun! Here's my favorite excerpt:

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin...

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find the newer collections by Billy Collins are rather preoccupied with mortality, which is understandable but not always fun to read about, so it was nice to go back to this earlier collection, first published in 1991, to find him in high spirits and still trying to figure out women. Favorites: "The Wires of the Night" (haunting poem about death; I realize this is ironic given what I just said a few lines ago), the wonderful "Nostalgia," and the title poem.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say enough about how much I loved this poetry anthology. Collins pulls you in with his wit and then spins deep truth about ordinary, simple-on-the-surface concepts. His playfulness and humor permeate every poem, and his creativity and imagination are seemingly boundless.

If you haven't read this already, I highly recommend it!

[Castles · Rating 2 out of 5]

His poetry just didn’t touch me.

There are a lot of references and name dropping which I did pick up, but at some point, very early one, it seems more like an arrogant waving of his knowledge than a real poetic effort. Maybe I’m missing something. Strange.

[Alexander Rolfe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked Forgetfulness best, but also The Willies, and Weighing the Dog. And I liked the thought of kindergarten being the alphabet's only temple.

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Myself To Sleep

"...Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

into the first tentative flicker of a dream,
passing out of the bright precincts of attention
like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?..."

Weighing the Dog

"..It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods."

Night Sand

"When you injure me, as you must one day,
I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,
ambulating secretly inside his armor,

ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball
which will shelter his soft head, soft feet
and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.

Now can you see the silhouettes of rancher's hats
and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?"

[Liz Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book of early (1991) Billy Collins poems in a used bookstore in Provincetown this summer, and have been savoring it for a couple of weeks. It includes some of my favorite Collins poems—“Forgetfulness” and “The Death of Allegory”—and introduced me to many new ones. His writing is thoughtful, relatable, and often humorous. I like the way he thinks about the world and his place in it.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

After 400 pages of Philip Whalen, it was a pleasure to read poetry that makes sense. I like Collins. I enjoy his easy style, perhaps because my own style is similar or has become so in the past few years. I am new to Collins' work. A friend sent me a copy of one of his poems 4-5 years ago and that was my introduction. I've read a few poems since and I liked them but I never owned one of his books. I read "Aimless Love" at the library and its reading prompted a poem or two of my own. But then almost every poet I read prompts a poem or two. Reading John Ashbery produces rants in poetic form. Naomi Shahib Nye produces whimsical poems. Whalen even produced a few odd ones. But I digress.

While reading the Whalen book, I ordered seven books by Collins and this is the first I've read. His work is easy to read, easy to understand, comfortable. Not 'clever' in that 1980s academic poetry manner. He uses no gimmicks. Most of his ideas are interesting. Some aren't. But what appeals to me may turn you off and vice versa. Such is the nature of poetry. His work seems to have a homespun honesty within it that I enjoy. You may also.

[Ben Gertner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The king of the last line

[Danielle Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whimsical and humorous, with a sprinkle of education. Highly recommend

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

No matter how many poetry books I read (and there's been a record amount of them for me this year), I still can't quite figure out how to review poetry. My approach can be summed up by "I like what I like when I like it."

Real intellectual of me, I know.

But suffice it to say that Billy Collins is indeed a poet I like. Very, very much. If you're just beginning to explore the world of poetry, need a reintroduction, or are in love with the form, then Billy Collins is (in my opinion) one of our best. And of his three volumes of poetry I've now read, Questions About Angels is one of my favorites.

This is Billy Collins's fourth book of poetry (and one which was selected by my other favorite poet, Edward Hirsch, for the National Poetry Series). It is divided into four numbered and unnamed sections. Among my favorites are the poems having to do with birth and death, as symbolized by reading ("First Reader" and "Reading Myself to Sleep"), aging ("Forgetfulness"), and death and the afterlife ("Questions About Angels," "The Afterlife," "The Dead").

Being a bit of a morbid soul who has actually planned out such things, I wouldn't mind "Reading Myself to Sleep" being read at my funeral ... and being a practical soul, I include it here for the benefit of those who might (but hopefully won't anytime soon) have occasion to plan such an event.

Reading Myself to Sleep

The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom
where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding
my eyes through the narrow channels of print,

and the only movement in the night is the slight
swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,
and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.

Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

into the first tentative flicker of a dream,
passing out of the bright precincts of attention
like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?

All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling
into the liquid drop of sleep and then rising again
to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,

as if pulled from the sea back into a boat
where a discussion is raging on subject or other,
on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.

Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,

to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside
where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself

dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,
letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it
in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with
daylight.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cover and the title of this collection are both misleading. Very misleading. The collection is divided into four parts. Of the four parts, only one (the second part) reflects what the cover and title would suggest - that is, a poetry collection dealing with religious themes. And even in the second part, these religious themes are minimal. Poems with titles like "Questions About Angels", "A Wonder of the World", "The Afterlife", and "The Dead" are likewise misleading.

"Questions About Angels" is a poem that pokes fun at the question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, elaborating on the question and asking why we don't ask other questions about angels...

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
(pg. 25)

(Granted, the religious themes are evident in this passage, but this is about as religious as it gets - which is not a fair representation of the overall text.)

"A Wonder of the World" is a poem that is all set-up and no pay-off. Collins builds the reader's anticipation, describing without revealing the so-called "Wonder of the World"...

It looks different than it does in photographs
and it is nothing like what you had imagined,
but there it is, motionless, unavoidable, real.
(pg. 27)

"The Afterlife" does not commit to any one interpretation of the afterlife, but rather suggests that every person is sent to a personal afterlife "according to (their) own private beliefs"...

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
(pg. 33)

Collins breaks from poems of Angels and Death and the Afterlife by ending the second part with "Going Out for Cigarettes", a poem that explores a familiar scenario...

one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,
not one phone call, not even a postcard from Rio.

The fourth part follows a similar continuity, with poems that sometimes lapse into parody - poems such as "Metamorphosis", "Wolf", and "Rip Van Winkle".

"Metamorphosis", perhaps my favourite of the poems from the fourth part (in part because I admire Kafka), asks or the synonymous author...

If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence
perhaps he could transform me into something new,
a slow willful river running through a forest,
or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters
hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary.
(pg. 70)

"Wolf" is a play on the wolves of fairy tales, in which the poet describes a wolf, not the anthropomorphic wolf of cartoons but a real wold on all fours, reading a book of fairy tales. Not surprisingly, the poems ends...

Later that night, lost in a town of pigs,
he knocks over houses with his breath.
(pg. 76)

"Rip Van Winkle" is a simple rumination on the familiar story. Collins contemplates the real-life implications of Rip Van Winkle's decades-long slumber, and muses somewhat aimlessly...

Here reclines the patron saint of sleep.
He has sawed enough logs to heat the Land of Nod.
His dreams are longer than all of homer.
And the Z above his head looks anchored in the air.

These aren't bad poems, but overall the second and fourth part of the collections contained my least favourite poems. The first and third part, however, compensate for any shortcoming in the second and fourth. Herein the poet had accumulated some of his best poems, including "The Death of Allegory", "The Norton Anthology of English Literature", "Purity", "Come Running", "Weighing the Dog", and "Vade Mecum" - here is the poet at his best: his humour is most potent, his wit is most striking, and his structure is more refined.

"The Death of Allegory" is a poem that literalizes the allegorical figures of Renaissance paintings and asks what became of them...

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.
(pg. 13)

"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" is a satirical response to the standards by which a poets is categorized within an era (be it Victorian, Elizabethan, medieval, etc...), deconstructing the apparent relevance of the poet's birth and death, and then departing completely...

Did you know that it is possible if you read a poem
enough times, if you read it over and over without stopping,
that you can make the author begin to spin gently,
even affectionately, in his grave?
(pg. 17)

"Purity" is a demonstration of the poet's humour, in which he claims to remove his skin and organs as part of his writing ritual (the humour is in his suggestion that sometimes he neglects to remove his penis)...

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.
(pg. 42)

"Come Running" appeals to me personally for its use of abstraction. It is an abstraction the reader will recognize from other poems, in which an idea becomes an object - in this case, the poet's name becomes an object that is stolen by the neighbor's dog...

Perhaps the dog was never given a name
and is not eating mine with pleasure
under a porch in the cool, lattice-shadowed dirt.

Perhaps late tonight I will hear the voice
of my neighbor as she stands at her back door,
hands cupped around her mouth, calling my name,
and I will leap the hedge and come running.
(pg. 52)

"Weighing the Dog" is a narrative reminiscent of Raymond Carver, a narrative that begins with an occurrence that is simultaneously uncommon and commonplace (so uncommon that it is believably commonplace). Ultimately, this occurrence tells us something about the character's life, and the circumstances surrounding this small otherwise trivial occurrence...

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.
(pg. 56)

"Vade Mecum" is a short poem (the shortest in the collection) but one that is disarming in its simplicity and sentimentality...

I want the scissors to be 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.
(pg. 61)

Who doesn't want to be carried in this book? Reading this poem I feel sentimental for a person I haven't met, sentimental for a book I haven't seen.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Collins as a conceptual poet (which I suspect he might hate). I think he does plainspoken, funny, and quirky well. I appreciate his accessibility. That said . . . is this poetry? I know it is, but it doesn't always feel like poetry to me. It lacks the lines that seize you, that create those "stop and process" moments--or perhaps it just delivers them in such offhand, shrugging tones that it almost makes the messages more inaccessible because they don't pull you in, make you think, make you notice. When I read Collins, it's like he's doing his thing and I'm not really invited; I feel more like an observer than a participant. I like to wander through a poem, and the poems in Questions About Angels don't seem to want me to do that--they just sidle along past me. I did like the work for its novelty of subject matter (the skeleton with a penis is a highlight) and a few choice lines and thoughts--I just wish those lines and thoughts had left more of a lasting impression so that I could remember what they are now.

[Krista Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many favorites...
"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" - reference to History - Paula S.

"Questions Abut Angels"

"The First Geniuses"
"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."

"The Afterlife"
"They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at a window examining the winter trees,/ every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

"Field Guide"
"Then as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger/looks up from his magazine and says 'wisteria'"

"Weighing the Dog"
"...and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods"

"The History Teacher" - again, P. Sampson

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collins has a singular voice, that manages to be beautiful and humorous with simple language which expresses complex ideas. His reading voice is also terrific. He seems like a guy you would meet in a bar and strike up a conversation with, and he would seem nice and normal, and then he would just start dropping pointed pearls out of nowhere and you would damn well buy that man another beer.

[Leland · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you were gifted enough to experience language like you experience a sunset in a new and amazing landscape, you would probably find Collins' mix of language and experience unexceptional and uninspiring. For the rest of us, it's a fascinating revelation.

[Alberta Adji · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best relaxing poems are in!
Loving Billy Collins forever, for his soothing, mild gossamer thread woven words!

[Jan Moens · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[J Chritsian · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is very, very jarring to read this stuff alongside a big grip of Alice Notley. I like Alice Notley a lot better.

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gather that Billy Collins is known for being an accessible poet and this collection bears evidence to that claim. The pieces here pull out all the stops to draw a reader in: plain speaking, witticisms, silly imagery, whimsy, comfortable rhythm, brevity. I was reminded of Shel Silverstein, which may be a poor comparison.

Some pieces really did work for me, like when he tried to capture the sensation of reading at night, in the moments before drifting off to sleep:

All readers know this sinking feeling of falling
into the liquid of sleep and then rising again
to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,
"Reading Myself to Sleep"

Or when he mused on the feeling of forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of
Forgetfulness

If I didn't keep notes on the things that I have read and enjoyed, I too would lose the details and then the memories.

I suppose that these poems and other fit into what seem like overarching themes about death and the afterlife, perhaps also adjacent themes about remembering, forgetting, drifting off, and change. It's not really spiritual poetry, as one might guess with a title like this. I am catching parallel, secular portrayals of death as transformation, dissipation, as the moment "when we run out of footprints" ("Pensée") and afterlife in a more cosmic sense of becoming "little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere" ("The Afterlife"). Many poems are about movement and impermanence.

Not all of the poems spoke to me. Some just found too whimsical. But the ones that I liked really did leave me with things to think about.

P.S. Goodreads is not good with line breaks and indentation, so the appearance of the snippet from "Forgetfulness" is a little off.

[Caroline Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

So let’s say there’s a Mt. Rushmore of American poets and whoever else you insist belongs up there, it seems like Billy Collins has to get one of the spots.

Why? Because his poetry is so inescapably American. When you read those classic British poets, even at their most passionate, you can sense they’re sitting up straight, that they’re wearing long sleeves and a stiff collar. Collins gives the impression of a warm sweater over slumped shoulders - comfort, not laziness.

His poems may not belong in a gilded frame or in a manicured garden, but they are polished. They are focused and clearly crafted. He’s an American through and through but not only that - he is also an American artist.

For my taste, Collins is twice the American poet that Frost was. You can fight me on this but read a collection of Frost and then read Questions about Angels. What do you think then?

Here’s one of my favorites:

“The History Teacher”


Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy Collins makes me laugh. He writes about situations that are usually serious and imagines them as even more serious, which is funny to me. Take death, for instance. In his poem "The Dead," he recalls how people like to say that "the dead are always looking down on us." This could (and maybe should) be a sobering thought, but you have to read what Collins follows up with:


"The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down from the glass-bottom boats of

heaven

as they row themselves slowly through eternity."


What imagery! Collins takes a sobering topic (dead people who are watching us) and then pairs it with the most mundane thing they could be seeing us do (putting on our shoes or making a sandwich). Can you imagine being dead, and looking down at the people you used to know and love and hate and worship, and there they are just putting two pieces of bread together in a dimly lit kitchen? How boring and average, right?

But the "boring" and the "average" are what make Collins' poetry so great. He can make an ordinary white cloud seem fascinating. He can take a normal phrase or idea- like a father "going out for cigarettes" and not returning home- and give it new life. A lot of times his skill makes me laugh, but I also stop and think about what he's written. Most poetry encourages you to pause and reflect, and Collins, even with the bits of humor sprinkled throughout his lines, certainly will teach you something new. You'll look at whatever subject he's chosen to champion in an entirely different way.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collins' place within contemporary poetry is very interesting to me, as he could be accused of writing for a non-existent demographic of "people who find Poetry too esoteric but read Kafka and Pascal." In other words, a middlebrow poet in a field too small for that kind of differentiation. In terms of the poems themselves, I really love quite a few, especially "The History Teacher," "The Norton Anthology of English Literature," "Forgetfulness." I generally enjoy the ones that are essentially intellectual doodles in response to some kind of aesthetic experience. Taking the book as a whole, though, can be a bit exhausting; Dwight Garner evoked Jerry Seinfeld, which is apt, and I also found myself thinking of Tim Robinson's office character with a "creative imagination" that must under no circumstances be encouraged. It's easy to parody: "They say not to count your chickens before they hatch, // but perhaps counting the fragile ovoid // forms is a form of penance" etc. Ultimately I'm less interested in the organic whole of the work, though, than the highlights, and I am content with Collins' most successful notions.