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Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 811.54 COL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal
"The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday."-- The Wall Street Journal
Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country's most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins's reputation as one of America's most interesting and durable poets.
Author Notes
Billy Collins has published six collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels and The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, his latest, sold more than 25,000 copies in its first year. He teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York and at Sarah Lawrence College. He was named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2000.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
As in his previous, beloved poetry collections, Collins (The Rain in Portugal, 2016) encapsulates life with both bonhomie and mordancy. Observing in his seventh decade that he has entered "the quiet cardigan harbor of my life," he offers pared down, courtly, and wistful poems, but Collins still ambushes the reader with clashes between the profound and the prosaic. The poet somberly records the names of his dead, then later uses the reverse side of the paper to jot down a shopping list. A poet of home and habit, writing of coffee and pets, Collins is also a world traveler, offering striking impressions of different lands and recording poignant and exhilarating time travels, including a return to his father's clattering, smoky 1950s office. His free-roaming imagination even carries him down into the hidden world of whales, who inspire the title poem's question, "So is it too much to ask that one day a year / be set aside for keeping in mind / . . . the multitude of these mammoth creatures." Collins delights, skewers, and enlightens.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog She's painfully slow, so I often have to stop and wait while she examines some roadside weeds as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog. And she's not a pretty sight anymore, dragging one of her hind legs, her coat too matted to brush or comb, and a snout white as a marshmallow. We usually walk down a disused road that runs along the edge of a lake, whose surface trembles in a high wind and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold. We don't walk very far before she sits down on her worn haunches and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes. Then it's time to carry her back to the car. Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes, I realize I should tell you she's not really seventy-five. She's fourteen. I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow. I mean who really cares about another person's dog? Everything else I've said is true, except the part about her being fourteen. I mean she's old, but not that old, and it's not polite to divulge the true age of a lady. Contemporary Americans I was trying to make my way across a busy street in San Francisco, while carrying the new anthology of poetry I'd been flipping through earlier that morning-- with my pot of tea and two pieces of cinnamon toast-- in which I was wedged between James Tate and Bob Dylan because the poets were arranged old to young, according to age. I had to avoid a couple of cars, cross over two sets of trolley tracks, and dodge a guy with a ski cap on a bicycle in order to get across the street and enter one of the city's many hospitable parks with their hedges, benches, and shade trees and often girls on a blanket, a juggler, an old man doing tai-chi. And that's where I lay down on the soft grass, closed my eyes, and after a little while began to picture the three of us lined up in a row according to the editor's wishes, sliding out of our mothers in order, one after the other, then ending up pressed together on a shelf in a corner bookstore, yodeling away in the dark. Paris in May A teddy bear in a store window, three housepainters waiting to cross a boulevard, a woman in a café, her red nails on a man's nape while she smokes-- what are we to make of all this? In the church of Saint-Sulpice, the Virgin holds her baby to her chest as she stands on the round earth, appearing to be unaware of the serpent she is crushing with one foot. Outside, four stone lions guard a fountain. Is this a puzzle I am meant to solve before the evening bells ring again-- here a man wearing a newspaper hat, there a child alone on a flowery balcony? An outdoor table on Rue Cassette seemed a good enough place to sort things out. And sure enough, after two milky-green glasses of Pernod, the crowd flowed around me like a breeze, and I found a link between my notebook and the soft Parisian sky, both being almost the same pale shade of blue. Excerpted from Whale Day: And Other Poems by Billy Collins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
