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Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes: Selected Poems
'Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world' Carol Ann Duffy Readers will only have to open this book at random to realize the privation a life without Billy Collins has been. A writer of immense grace and humanity, Billy Collins shows how the great forces of history and nature converge on the tiniest details of our lives - and in doing so presents them in a new radiance. He is also unbelievably funny. 'The most popular poet in America' New York Times 'Billy Collins writes lovely poems ...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides' John Updike 'Billy Collins' medium is a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I'd follow this man's mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised' Michael Donaghy 'Smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm voiced, easy to love' E. Annie Proulx
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 2000
About the author
Billy Collins
152 books1,637 followersWilliam 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
August 27, 2008
The self-congratulatory dumbness is staggering. Ms. Dickinson would kick his ass.
July 18, 2019
Just luv this poetry!
But I have to say nearly all these poems are also in a book titled 'Sailing Alone Around The Room'
But still great to read them again.
But I have to say nearly all these poems are also in a book titled 'Sailing Alone Around The Room'
But still great to read them again.
April 7, 2018
I'd say I've found a dozen new favourite poems in this fairly thickish volume. Not a fantastic hit rate. The rest are perfectly serviceable - Collins' wit and candour and self-deprecating humour are a constant throughout the book. Here is the modest and unassuming poet, stuck in his warm and rambling house in the middle of the snowy fastness of New England. He has a pretty good life - wife, house, dog, car, tapping at the typewriter, taking the odd Italian vacation- yes, he has a nice setup alright, and he knows it too. The poetry though, for all its qualities, frequently reveals a lack of imagination or ambition, a certain density, as almost always Collins plays it with a straight and predictable bat, taking the easy way out, as often as not falling back on familiar tropes and cliches. True surprises are far and few, but those are the best - Winter Syntax, Plight of the Troubadour, Consolation, The First Dream, the wonder of Marginalia, even the short sharp hit of Man in Space.
Accessible is all very well, but I think I'd expected more. My curiosity re Collins is now sated.
Accessible is all very well, but I think I'd expected more. My curiosity re Collins is now sated.
January 29, 2021
Reread in an afternoon recently and reminded of why this is one of my fave books of poems
September 26, 2025
He clearly thinks he writes great poems. I don’t.
February 12, 2026
This review contains my thoughts on the namesake poem alone, not the anthology to which it belongs. If a poem is indeed a feeling, I would never ask someone to ignore theirs. I cannot argue someone out of revulsion any more than they can argue me into it. I ask instead that we look beyond our kneejerk response to a premise and examine the text itself, its substance and its form, that we may better understand it.
Much ink has been spilled over ex-Laureate Billy Collins and his celebrated, notorious “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.” Some react with disgust, of which I’m sure Collins would approve, and accuse the author of chauvinism. Their misgivings are well-founded, as we live in a patriarchy in which women exist to be seen (rather than to be), but to believe the allegations is to misjudge the poem, its writer, and the predilections of heterosexual men. To judge it fairly, we must try it not as kink, but as satire—as critique. The evidence: that poets choose their words with intent and not by happenstance.
The poem takes a rather clinical title, considering its superficially lewd content. The speaker doesn’t “Disrobe” Emily Dickinson, doesn’t “Ravish” or “Romance” her or bare her secrets and her soul. He doesn’t even “Undress” her. He merely removes her outer layer. He might as well be shucking corn, for all the passion he displays. This might seem a minor nitpick, if you assume the worst, but the title sets the tone, and detached diction pervades the text. Picture a teenage groping, delayed by unpracticed hands and their failure to unhook a bra, and a dress puddling like piss. Whom does labor titillate? Are Gordian undergarments the trappings of male fantasy? If a man conjures for himself a lover, is her touch to him like unyielding ice? How frigid is she, to be a berg? It feels more than ungenerous to accept the similes “I proceeded like a polar explorer” and “it was like riding a swan” as straightfaced boasts—it feels dishonest. It dumbfounds me that some cannot hear the irony, the humor. (You’d think Peary ventured north for the ice.) Sailors avoid icebergs; for Collins, the nude spells disaster. His speaker charts a course for an obstacle, rather than a destination, that he never reaches. Even in the closing lines, Dickinson sports a corset, her body—her essence—unattainable as ever. This is not how men talk about women. This is not how men talk about anything. Never in my literary wanderings have I encountered such deeroticized eroticism.
For a sexual object, Dickinson stays conspicuously abstract. She haunts the margins like a ghost, unseen and untouched. Can one be objectified in a poem in which one never appears? Collins hides her nakedness with prudish shame and ascetic discipline. Every thread and stitch gets catalogued, but never once do we peek what they conceal. Ours is the fiber, not the flesh. How chaste a striptease! How shapeless a heap of laundry! (You’d think johns visit brothels for the nightgowns.) The breast? the buttock? the lips? Less than implied. We glimpse a shoulder, her feet, and finally her eyes and hair: those same features visible were Dickinson still wearing the dress shown in her famed and only photograph. You could call the portrait skin deep, but that would require a great deal more skin. When he, with the coyness of a Harlequin paperback, tells of his hands’ slipping inside, Collins has yet to loose the corset. He remains, at his tawdriest, a flirt, promising the pulp but providing the rind. Despite claims on this very site, there is no rape, no sex act whatsoever. Recall early Hitchcock viewers, certain they had witnessed the knife penetrate Janet Leigh. All we see of Dickinson is her wardrobe; all we hear of her are a breath, a sigh, and her words. Not a moan, mind you, but a sigh. Not of pleasure, nor of anticipation, nor even of boredom, but of relief. Perhaps she rejoices at no longer being smothered. Perhaps she senses that the poem—and with it, her undressing—nears its end. Her words come out garbled. People will tell you that Collins quotes Dickinson. I tell you he misquotes her.
“[Some] readers,” sayeth Collins, “realize…that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun.” Dickinson says that reason is comprised of planks and that she is a loaded gun. In “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” “a Plank in Reason, broke.” In “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun,” the speaker’s life “had stood…In Corners,” but the speaker herself has “but the power to kill, Without - the power to die.” Guns, after all, are hardly known for loitering. I would no sooner accuse Collins of ignorance of his subject than I would of having a fabric fetish. These crimes are committed with malice aforethought, to nefarious ends, but Collins is guilty mainly of naiveté. He never dreamed that readers might conflate the sexual and the sexualized. The fool could not predict that some would see misogyny in his sardonic seduction.
I struggle to take the outrage seriously. Handwringers warn that Billy Collins will return in “Fondling Emily Dickinson’s Carcass as It Melts in the Sun,” while explicit smut starring living artists clogs the sewers of Wattpad and MechaHitler coats children in donut glaze. Only the safest elephants fear so small a mouse. There is, I cannot deny, something unseemly—some would say indecent—in the methodical way Collins details the titular process. (Checklists turn foreplay into a chore.) He plants readers in the perch of a voyeur as he exposes an intimate moment to the world and records it for posterity. One must wonder how a recluse such as Dickinson might react to her private goings-on being made public. I imagine she would react with the same disgust with which this poem was met.
Death of the author has gained a popularity proportionate to the amount we know of authors’ lives. It offers a smeared lens, but a necessary one. Authors can tell you what they meant to do. Only readers can tell you what they did. Still, biographies remain a lucrative market, and biographers remain fixated on mundane fact: the numbers called productivity, persons and placenames, and the dates for arrivals and departures. Seldom do biographers confront the ethics of their snooping or question their right to snoop. Rarely does the shadow of truth cross their threshold. They feel no guilt in violating the privacy Dickinson prized. They try to unweave a rainbow no prism can replicate. It is an errand as silly as a simile and as doomed as a clause.
Poetry is not a code to break. You cannot demystify the mystical, and Collins knows what you get for trying. He clutters his stanzas with irrelevant ephemera, with factoids and the fashions of her time, and concludes them with a sampling of her oeuvre as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He tells you Dickinson lived in Amherst, which you know, and that she lived in the nineteenth century, which you know, and in case there were any confusion, he tells you Amherst is in America. He shows you how she dresses, but never how she feels. What is a poem, if not a feeling? Could it be said prosaically, it would be said in prose. “I cannot tell you everything,” says the speaker. Well, biographies can tell you the first thing, but not the thing with feathers.
Mistake not wit for another kind of playfulness. Search these half-remembered allusions for telltale signs of lust, these Arctic fumblings for a trace of heat, and you will be left in the cold. Try as I might, I cannot read this poem as pornography, much less as necrophilia. It is fundamentally, metatextually unsexy—and of course it is. Collins feels no desire for Dickinson the corpse. Rather, he feels contempt for those who would fuck it. To court Dickinson the body, the ex-person, is to jilt Dickinson the artist and the body of work that survives her. “Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes” proves the futility of exhuming a cadaver and asking it to explain itself. All you’ll earn for all your trouble are a heavy scoop, tired arms, and the silence of a Sabbath in Amherst. Seek the poet in her past, and find a distortion of her poetry. Undress a woman with facts, and you’ll have a description of her clothes. That’s the naked truth.
Much ink has been spilled over ex-Laureate Billy Collins and his celebrated, notorious “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.” Some react with disgust, of which I’m sure Collins would approve, and accuse the author of chauvinism. Their misgivings are well-founded, as we live in a patriarchy in which women exist to be seen (rather than to be), but to believe the allegations is to misjudge the poem, its writer, and the predilections of heterosexual men. To judge it fairly, we must try it not as kink, but as satire—as critique. The evidence: that poets choose their words with intent and not by happenstance.
The poem takes a rather clinical title, considering its superficially lewd content. The speaker doesn’t “Disrobe” Emily Dickinson, doesn’t “Ravish” or “Romance” her or bare her secrets and her soul. He doesn’t even “Undress” her. He merely removes her outer layer. He might as well be shucking corn, for all the passion he displays. This might seem a minor nitpick, if you assume the worst, but the title sets the tone, and detached diction pervades the text. Picture a teenage groping, delayed by unpracticed hands and their failure to unhook a bra, and a dress puddling like piss. Whom does labor titillate? Are Gordian undergarments the trappings of male fantasy? If a man conjures for himself a lover, is her touch to him like unyielding ice? How frigid is she, to be a berg? It feels more than ungenerous to accept the similes “I proceeded like a polar explorer” and “it was like riding a swan” as straightfaced boasts—it feels dishonest. It dumbfounds me that some cannot hear the irony, the humor. (You’d think Peary ventured north for the ice.) Sailors avoid icebergs; for Collins, the nude spells disaster. His speaker charts a course for an obstacle, rather than a destination, that he never reaches. Even in the closing lines, Dickinson sports a corset, her body—her essence—unattainable as ever. This is not how men talk about women. This is not how men talk about anything. Never in my literary wanderings have I encountered such deeroticized eroticism.
For a sexual object, Dickinson stays conspicuously abstract. She haunts the margins like a ghost, unseen and untouched. Can one be objectified in a poem in which one never appears? Collins hides her nakedness with prudish shame and ascetic discipline. Every thread and stitch gets catalogued, but never once do we peek what they conceal. Ours is the fiber, not the flesh. How chaste a striptease! How shapeless a heap of laundry! (You’d think johns visit brothels for the nightgowns.) The breast? the buttock? the lips? Less than implied. We glimpse a shoulder, her feet, and finally her eyes and hair: those same features visible were Dickinson still wearing the dress shown in her famed and only photograph. You could call the portrait skin deep, but that would require a great deal more skin. When he, with the coyness of a Harlequin paperback, tells of his hands’ slipping inside, Collins has yet to loose the corset. He remains, at his tawdriest, a flirt, promising the pulp but providing the rind. Despite claims on this very site, there is no rape, no sex act whatsoever. Recall early Hitchcock viewers, certain they had witnessed the knife penetrate Janet Leigh. All we see of Dickinson is her wardrobe; all we hear of her are a breath, a sigh, and her words. Not a moan, mind you, but a sigh. Not of pleasure, nor of anticipation, nor even of boredom, but of relief. Perhaps she rejoices at no longer being smothered. Perhaps she senses that the poem—and with it, her undressing—nears its end. Her words come out garbled. People will tell you that Collins quotes Dickinson. I tell you he misquotes her.
“[Some] readers,” sayeth Collins, “realize…that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun.” Dickinson says that reason is comprised of planks and that she is a loaded gun. In “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” “a Plank in Reason, broke.” In “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun,” the speaker’s life “had stood…In Corners,” but the speaker herself has “but the power to kill, Without - the power to die.” Guns, after all, are hardly known for loitering. I would no sooner accuse Collins of ignorance of his subject than I would of having a fabric fetish. These crimes are committed with malice aforethought, to nefarious ends, but Collins is guilty mainly of naiveté. He never dreamed that readers might conflate the sexual and the sexualized. The fool could not predict that some would see misogyny in his sardonic seduction.
I struggle to take the outrage seriously. Handwringers warn that Billy Collins will return in “Fondling Emily Dickinson’s Carcass as It Melts in the Sun,” while explicit smut starring living artists clogs the sewers of Wattpad and MechaHitler coats children in donut glaze. Only the safest elephants fear so small a mouse. There is, I cannot deny, something unseemly—some would say indecent—in the methodical way Collins details the titular process. (Checklists turn foreplay into a chore.) He plants readers in the perch of a voyeur as he exposes an intimate moment to the world and records it for posterity. One must wonder how a recluse such as Dickinson might react to her private goings-on being made public. I imagine she would react with the same disgust with which this poem was met.
Death of the author has gained a popularity proportionate to the amount we know of authors’ lives. It offers a smeared lens, but a necessary one. Authors can tell you what they meant to do. Only readers can tell you what they did. Still, biographies remain a lucrative market, and biographers remain fixated on mundane fact: the numbers called productivity, persons and placenames, and the dates for arrivals and departures. Seldom do biographers confront the ethics of their snooping or question their right to snoop. Rarely does the shadow of truth cross their threshold. They feel no guilt in violating the privacy Dickinson prized. They try to unweave a rainbow no prism can replicate. It is an errand as silly as a simile and as doomed as a clause.
Poetry is not a code to break. You cannot demystify the mystical, and Collins knows what you get for trying. He clutters his stanzas with irrelevant ephemera, with factoids and the fashions of her time, and concludes them with a sampling of her oeuvre as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He tells you Dickinson lived in Amherst, which you know, and that she lived in the nineteenth century, which you know, and in case there were any confusion, he tells you Amherst is in America. He shows you how she dresses, but never how she feels. What is a poem, if not a feeling? Could it be said prosaically, it would be said in prose. “I cannot tell you everything,” says the speaker. Well, biographies can tell you the first thing, but not the thing with feathers.
Mistake not wit for another kind of playfulness. Search these half-remembered allusions for telltale signs of lust, these Arctic fumblings for a trace of heat, and you will be left in the cold. Try as I might, I cannot read this poem as pornography, much less as necrophilia. It is fundamentally, metatextually unsexy—and of course it is. Collins feels no desire for Dickinson the corpse. Rather, he feels contempt for those who would fuck it. To court Dickinson the body, the ex-person, is to jilt Dickinson the artist and the body of work that survives her. “Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes” proves the futility of exhuming a cadaver and asking it to explain itself. All you’ll earn for all your trouble are a heavy scoop, tired arms, and the silence of a Sabbath in Amherst. Seek the poet in her past, and find a distortion of her poetry. Undress a woman with facts, and you’ll have a description of her clothes. That’s the naked truth.
March 17, 2008
Gotta love Billy! My favorite poem is "Forgetfulness."
November 2, 2013
A pornographic, mean-spirited title poem about raping Emily Dickinson is but the most offensive poem in this book by one of the most overrated poets who has ever published.
October 20, 2019
A book that I have immediately taken straight to my heart. I adore this man and his words.
November 21, 2021
This book is comprised of four shorter poetry collections, and I very much preferred the first two; 'The apple that astonished Paris', and 'Questions about angels'. There is a simplicity and elegance to the poems in those sections that makes them feel light. In particular, my favourite poem of the collection, 'The dead', imagines dead people looking down at the living from heaven, and ends with these arresting lines:
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
There is a self-conscious 'ordinariness' about many of the poems, and it seems as if the author has made a deliberate decision to avoid more complicated literary formulations in order to keep the work 'accessible'. This mostly works, largely because the affectation of simplicity is, of course, an affectation. However, there are occasions when such a presentation becomes excessive, for example, in 'American sonnet', which is an somewhat irritating paean to small town life:
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
etc.
Despite this, re-reading this book after a considerable time has made me think that I would like to read Collins' other collections at some point. I certainly think that most of this work could be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't read a lot of poetry, which was no doubt the author's intention.
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
There is a self-conscious 'ordinariness' about many of the poems, and it seems as if the author has made a deliberate decision to avoid more complicated literary formulations in order to keep the work 'accessible'. This mostly works, largely because the affectation of simplicity is, of course, an affectation. However, there are occasions when such a presentation becomes excessive, for example, in 'American sonnet', which is an somewhat irritating paean to small town life:
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
etc.
Despite this, re-reading this book after a considerable time has made me think that I would like to read Collins' other collections at some point. I certainly think that most of this work could be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't read a lot of poetry, which was no doubt the author's intention.
September 6, 2023
I am not a reader of poetry and came to this collection by Billy Collins on the recommendation of a friend. What impresses me about this work is not so much the collection itself, but that there are still writers in our world who are making a living... as poets! I'm not trying to be nasty, I simply think that it says something somewhat wonderful about our humanity. Art in all its forms needs to be valued and appreciated.
I enjoyed visiting this collection from time to time. There were some poems, 'Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House', 'The Best Cigarette', 'The History Teacher', which compelled me to jump willingly and ecstatically into this literary pool. But it was 'Man In Space' that really leapt off the page, shaking me with its insight. All other poems were highly accessible, but a toe in the water was enough for me.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes has not made me a convert to the form, yet I enjoyed Billy Collins' quirky, often whimsical perspectives on everyday situations.
I enjoyed visiting this collection from time to time. There were some poems, 'Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House', 'The Best Cigarette', 'The History Teacher', which compelled me to jump willingly and ecstatically into this literary pool. But it was 'Man In Space' that really leapt off the page, shaking me with its insight. All other poems were highly accessible, but a toe in the water was enough for me.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes has not made me a convert to the form, yet I enjoyed Billy Collins' quirky, often whimsical perspectives on everyday situations.
October 1, 2019
This anthology is an amalgam of poems published in previous books. I picked it up at a used book store because I'm a bit of a completist, and because it was a signed copy. I love how Collins consistently veers into unexpected directions in his poems, and usually doesn't veer back to where he started. I love his sense of humor; I love his Catullan sensibility.
The poem that struck me most in this revisit was "The Blues," the opening stabnza of which is:
Much of what is said here
must be said twice,
a reminder that no one
takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.
The poem that struck me most in this revisit was "The Blues," the opening stabnza of which is:
Much of what is said here
must be said twice,
a reminder that no one
takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.
April 10, 2021
Ho deciso di leggere qualcosa di Billy Collins dopo aver visto una sua Ted Talk che mi era piaciuta molto. Ho scelto questa raccolta perché il titolo mi incuriosiva, e anche perché si tratta di una antologia di poesie provenienti da altre raccolte precedenti. Onestamente mi aspettavo qualcosa di più, anche se alcune poesie sono molto belle. Qualcuna commovente. Credo che in futuro leggerò altro di Collins.
December 21, 2021
billy collins was probably one of my first introductions to poetry and how wonderful and rich the day to day experience of being alive can be. that said, this collection isn't as exciting as it might have been a few years ago. there's some pretty good pieces in here: winter syntax, morning, man in space, to name a few. but by and large, the subject matter kinda remains the same and so does the style. overall a pretty good experience but not exactly a life-changing read.
August 7, 2020
Collins, for a poet, is super accessible, almost always glib, occasionally profound.
I enjoyed it quite a bit, but there was not much of a wow factor, and there were a number of misses for me. I guess I can enjoy the glibness and the self-conscious meta-ing, but it's not really what I'm looking for in poetry. But it's fun and light and was an enjoyable collection to read through.
I enjoyed it quite a bit, but there was not much of a wow factor, and there were a number of misses for me. I guess I can enjoy the glibness and the self-conscious meta-ing, but it's not really what I'm looking for in poetry. But it's fun and light and was an enjoyable collection to read through.
November 24, 2023
this collection started off strong and gradually got more boring and unoriginal… i liked quite a few poems at the start, and the ideas were often original and interesting. the poetry is very prose-like, but it still has some very beautiful phrasings. toward the end i didn‘t really see anything extraordinary in the poems, though. they weren‘t bad, just a bit boring.
October 27, 2024
I like the actual poems, but I had to deduct stars for two reasons: there are no new poems in this collection, only poems copied from other collections (all of which I’ve read), and also, I don’t like the title of this collection (and the poem its named after—fan fiction-y creepiness).
Tho I still like Collins and some of my favorites of his were in here, so I didn’t mind rereading everything.
Tho I still like Collins and some of my favorites of his were in here, so I didn’t mind rereading everything.
September 22, 2021
I love Billy Collins. This is as much for his beautifully-turned phrase and his keen poetic sensibilities as it is for his riotous humour and acerbic wit. A fine collection by a poet who delights and surprises from line to line, time after time.
November 6, 2023
I was intrigued with the title & not disappointed at all. Collins’ poetry speaks of ordinary life with his imaginative twist on it. Often I gasp at where he leads me which is what poetry should do to the reader.
December 12, 2025
As with any collected volume, you're going to like some more than others. Not all the poems resonated with me. Others were gems that I'll go back to again and again. Make sure you read Men in Space.
p-s, s-s, v-s, a-n
p-s, s-s, v-s, a-n
March 20, 2011
The poetry quest continues ...
I wonder whether being described as 'accessible' makes a poet's fists clench? Yet it's one of the best words I can think of for American poet Billy Collins - along with gentle, thoughtful, funny, domestic. He somehow melds the sweeping reach of history with daily minutiae, in a way that feels effortless.
I think I was predisposed to enjoy Collins after watching him reading his poem 'Litany' (a poem not included in this anthology). Read straight, 'Litany' is potentially cod-sentimental; read with humour, it is marvellous to hear an audience laugh out loud at something so beautiful, as well as so crookedly funny.
There is often a smile at the end of Collins' poems, a neat little tick in the final lines. I had mentally noted that trait early on in the collection, and then found 'Lines Lost Among Trees', a wry elegy for a poem that came to him when he was out walking, but disappeared before he got home:
Music - jazz in particular - is a frequent detail or subject in the poems, woven into Collins' life; this is 'The Blues'
I also loved the suite of poems wrapped around artwork - him imagining a minuscule version of himself escaping into a Frederick Church in the Brooklyn Museum, his glee at Goya's outrageous, candle-festooned hat for night-time painting, the creation of an all-American beauty by reference to Edward Hopper (a poem that bookends nicely with 'Litany', linked to above) in 'Sweet Talk':
But I have to say that I fell, head of heels and most predictably, for the collection's title poem, 'Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes', given here in full:
'before my hands can part the fabric,/like a swimmer's dividing water,/and slip inside' - shiver.
I wonder whether being described as 'accessible' makes a poet's fists clench? Yet it's one of the best words I can think of for American poet Billy Collins - along with gentle, thoughtful, funny, domestic. He somehow melds the sweeping reach of history with daily minutiae, in a way that feels effortless.
I think I was predisposed to enjoy Collins after watching him reading his poem 'Litany' (a poem not included in this anthology). Read straight, 'Litany' is potentially cod-sentimental; read with humour, it is marvellous to hear an audience laugh out loud at something so beautiful, as well as so crookedly funny.
There is often a smile at the end of Collins' poems, a neat little tick in the final lines. I had mentally noted that trait early on in the collection, and then found 'Lines Lost Among Trees', a wry elegy for a poem that came to him when he was out walking, but disappeared before he got home:
... So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of timing,
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door. ...
Music - jazz in particular - is a frequent detail or subject in the poems, woven into Collins' life; this is 'The Blues'
Much of what is said here
must be said twice,
a reminder that no one
takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.
Nobody will listen, it would seem,
if you simply admit
your baby left you early this morning
she didn’t even stop to say good-bye.
But if you sing it again
with the help of the band
which will now lift you to a higher,
more ardent and beseeching key,
people will not only listen;
they will shift to the sympathetic
edges of their chairs,
moved to such acute anticipation
by that chord and the delay that follows,
they will not be able to sleep
unless you release with one finger
a scream from the throat of your guitar
and turn your head back to the microphone
to let them know
you’re a hard-hearted man
but that woman’s sure going to make you cry.
I also loved the suite of poems wrapped around artwork - him imagining a minuscule version of himself escaping into a Frederick Church in the Brooklyn Museum, his glee at Goya's outrageous, candle-festooned hat for night-time painting, the creation of an all-American beauty by reference to Edward Hopper (a poem that bookends nicely with 'Litany', linked to above) in 'Sweet Talk':
You are not the Mona Lisa
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.
You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.
But I have to say that I fell, head of heels and most predictably, for the collection's title poem, 'Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes', given here in full:
First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.
You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.
The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.
Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.
What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.
So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
'before my hands can part the fabric,/like a swimmer's dividing water,/and slip inside' - shiver.
October 5, 2018
pretty good poetry
August 21, 2022
A delight. Many highlights and such an accessible collection. The title poem is a beautiful intimate observation.
November 27, 2022
the most beautiful collection of poetry I've read in my life
April 23, 2025
Love this guy
March 5, 2026
4++. Nice selection
September 2, 2023
Day 1 #thesealeychallenge
‘Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’ by Billy Collins
My first poetry book to be read in this years challenge. Billy Collins is one if my favourite contemporary poets, former US Poet Laureate, and one of (at least three) Poets Laureate to be read in the coming month.
I love Billy Collins dry humour and the descriptive qualities he brings to his sometimes extraordinary scenarios, such as in Walking Across the Atlantic; or in Winter Syntax:
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight…
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography…
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
There is much to like about his Advice to Writers:
The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be, at the immaculate altar of your desk…
His similes are alive in both forms: the real and his imagined, such as the piano in Piano Lessons:
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.
I also really enjoy his slightly off-the-wall view of the world, writing like one of those jokes on the New Yorker desk calendar! To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now is an example of this, which begins: ‘Nobody here likes a wet dog.’ and ends asserting that on an alien world they are not liked either!
Excellent way to begin #thesealeychallenge 2023!
‘Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’ by Billy Collins
My first poetry book to be read in this years challenge. Billy Collins is one if my favourite contemporary poets, former US Poet Laureate, and one of (at least three) Poets Laureate to be read in the coming month.
I love Billy Collins dry humour and the descriptive qualities he brings to his sometimes extraordinary scenarios, such as in Walking Across the Atlantic; or in Winter Syntax:
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight…
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography…
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
There is much to like about his Advice to Writers:
The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be, at the immaculate altar of your desk…
His similes are alive in both forms: the real and his imagined, such as the piano in Piano Lessons:
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.
I also really enjoy his slightly off-the-wall view of the world, writing like one of those jokes on the New Yorker desk calendar! To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now is an example of this, which begins: ‘Nobody here likes a wet dog.’ and ends asserting that on an alien world they are not liked either!
Excellent way to begin #thesealeychallenge 2023!
June 25, 2017
I've either heard Collins read or have read for myself (and sometimes taught) the majority of the poems in this collection. That doesn't make it any less worthy of my time, however; on the contrary, the fact that so many of these poems are some of my favorites from Collins made this an extraordinary reading experience for me. It's true that, at first glance, most of these poems don't feel "serious" or "deep," but Collins has a way of lulling readers into a sort of false sense of security before enlightening us on his true purposes. Definitely worthwhile for anyone who wants a good collection of his poems without having to buy four separate books.
January 17, 2013
The clarity of his poems is not geometric - they are full of bits that stick out, strands that just peter out at the end, fits and starts and sudden distractions. It is a good simulation of what a thoughtful life really is like. And if he is jokier than most poets of this generation, that just makes him a more welcome guest among one's shelves, at least when one is in a humane sort of mood.
December 20, 2007
Billy, you know I will always love you.
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