NINE HORSES
by
Billy Collins
Random House
Hardcover, 120 pages
ISBN 1-4000-6177-6
$21.95
Like Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver, the poetry of Billy Collins actually communicates with the reader. His images shine clear, his phrasing is polished, he uses end-stopped lines easy to read, and his poems contain the flow and gentle roll of quiet music. He is also acutely aware of his surroundings. Consider Aimless Love, about falling in love all day long, at each moment of the day, and with every little thing in life, including the simple act of washing his hands with soap:
I
could feel myself falling again
as
I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
The music in this is a kind of subtle undertow,
maybe an undertone, pulling the reader along with slant rhymes at the end of the
lines so imperceptible you must study them to consciously discover their
magic. Compare
always
ready, now that I am dressed,
to
clear the boots of the beautiful,
the
boots of the strange,
as
they float down the river of this momentous day.
There is also academic wit, subtle irony, and not so implicit criticism of poetic litany, William Carlos Williams, Buddhism, and other targets by which Collins ranges near and far. But if this is not to your taste, much remains which shows why he was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-03. As in Ignorance:
And
I am inside my own head
like
a tiny homunculus,
a
creature so excited over his naked existence
that
he scurries all day
from
one eye socket to the other
just
to see what scenes are unfolding before me,
what
streets, what pastures.
In Balsa, he carves a little wooden sailboat, places it on the water, and stands aside to watch his childhood, that small vessel of wonder and cruelty, be blown away by sudden unexpected gusts.
But if such innocence for Collins has truly been carried off, it seems to return to him again and again in many of his better poems, such as Night Letter to the Reader, in which he steps outside at night, an animal in pajamas, where:
at one point, the moon,
looking like the top of
Shakespeare s
famous forehead,
appeared, quite unexpectedly,
illuminating a band of moving
clouds.
At his best, Collins celebrates what he so precisely calls the startling brevity of life. As in Today, a day in the spring so perfect he wants to throw open all the windows in the house, and unlatch the door to the canary s cage. Yes, we would all take more of those kind of days.
#