However arresting, outlandish, or hilarious, the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead are typically prompted by the familiar things of the world: dogs, stars, food, love, and marriage as well as life's local triumphs and disappointments, joys and shames. Collins's gift is to unlock the mysterious in the ordinary, and he is always careful to take his reader with him. Indeed, no other living poet has done more to reengage and revitalize poetry's readership, or so deservedly earned its trust. Few poets have his ability to mix ...
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However arresting, outlandish, or hilarious, the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead are typically prompted by the familiar things of the world: dogs, stars, food, love, and marriage as well as life's local triumphs and disappointments, joys and shames. Collins's gift is to unlock the mysterious in the ordinary, and he is always careful to take his reader with him. Indeed, no other living poet has done more to reengage and revitalize poetry's readership, or so deservedly earned its trust. Few poets have his ability to mix bold, unadorned statements with lyric invention and imaginative richness. And here in these new poems, Collins's inimitable tone - wry, smart, funny, and wise - takes on a darker shade, as the poems declare a deep awareness of transience and mortality. The result is the revelation of a world more precious, more fragile, richer in colour and form than ever. Praise for Billy Collins 'A writer . . . fully aware of his work's power to delight' New York Times 'A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace' New Yorker
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Who said I had to always play/the secretary of the Interior?
Billy Collins asks the question above in his poem, "Returning the Pencil to Its Tray" which concludes his most recent collection of poems, "Horoscopes for the Dead" (2011). In the poem, Collins describes the joy of the everyday as "the first bits of sun are on/ the yellow flowers behind the low wall," and "people in cars are on their way to work,/ and I will never have to write again." Collins follows with the wonderfully paradoxical line which is given at the top of this review and which worked for me as a recent retiree from the Department of the Interior. Collins finds he is "getting good at being blank,/staring at all the zeroes in the air" and enjoying the flow of life, taking it as it comes.
Many of this poems in this collection contrast life in the everyday, enjoying the passing show with its loves, variety, and inevitable transience, with death. Thus, in the title poem of the volume, Collins meditates upon the death of a friend. He brings to bear various cliche-described responsibilities that the deceased will no longer have to meet: "I can't imagine you ever facing a new problem/ with a positive attitude"... "you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting, nor do you have to think more of others,/ and never again will creative work take a back seat/to the business responsibilities that you never really had."... "And don't worry today or any day/about problems caused by your unwillingness/to interact rationally with your many associates." As opposed to his dead friend and his release from certain dreariness of responsibility, Collins juxtaposes the simple joy of living in which, "putting on the clothes I wore yesterday" the poet finds himself "pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle/ and pedaling along the shore road by the bay." in a poem which quietly celebrates the fragility of life for the living.
The first poem of the collection, "Grave", also explores the contrast between death and the living as the poet meditates upon his life at the grave of his parents. "What do you think of my new glasses/I asked as I stood under a shade tree/before the joined grave of my parents,/ and what followed was a long silence". The poet invents "the one hundred kinds of silence/according to the Chinese belief/each one distinct from the others," as he and the reader come to realize that the living must pursue their own lives free from the dead hands of those that loved them.
The poems in the volume that I especially enjoyed also included "The Flaneur" in which the poet describes his walking through the streets of an unnamed city in Florida, just as I enjoy wandering through the streets of my own Washington, D.C. and Silver Spring. As he describes the sights on his walk the poet contrasts what he sees with what he might have observed in Paris. He finds "no girls selling fruits or sweets from a cart,/no prostitutes circled under a streetlamp,/no solicitude of the moving crowd/where I could find the dream of refuge." The poet still finds meaning in his walking as he mutters "Who needs Europe?" while he falls "into a reverie on the folly of youth/and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life." The poem "On the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School" is an effective collage on the direction of three hundred years of American history. The diversity of history melds together in a moment of unity at the conclusion of the poem. Collins writes: "And then I heard their singing, all those voices/Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years/ Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,/History now a single chord, and time its key and measure."
In "Table Talk", Collins wittily contrasts certain forms of academic palaver with the immediacy of experience. "What She Said" satirizes thought-numbing patters of contemporary speech as the poem begins "When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,/ I was like give me a break." "Cemetery Ride" is another poem which contrasts the finality of death with the transience and joy of living when one can. In "Poetry Workshop held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West", Collins finds he cannot resist the temptation to "draw an analogy between cigar-making and poetry" in "the exemplary industry/ of those anonymous rollers and cutters -- /the best producing 300 cigars in a day/compared to 3 flawless poems in a lifetime if your lucky --".
Billy Collins, United States Poet Laurerate from 2001 -- 2003, remains the best-known contemporary American poet. Many readers, who otherwise would avoid what they find to be the bristling complexities of contemporary American poetry enjoy his work. Collins is an effective poet in his colloquialism and accessibility. Collins' writing is unpretentious and works when it remains within its own limits. Many of the poems in this book would not qualify for the "3 flawless poems" that Collins observes remains the ideal of many poets. But I found this volume enjoyable. Readers can properly gain an appreciation of the continued appeal of poetry through the work of Billy Collins.
