Billy Collins's poetry is far more conventional than the poetry I usually read. I feel like I shouldn't like it as much as I do, but it's like sitting back and watching a well executed Hollywood blockbuster, or better yet, romantic comedy. Collins's latest book is slightly darker in tone than som...
I have never really liked a book on poetry before, until now. Not only do I like this collection, I absolutely love it! I want to read it all over again, and out loud. My copy is only an ebook, and I'd love to own it in print someday, so that I can bring it with me anywhere, and read it to any fr...
I am a book addict. I own thousands of them. They fill most rooms of my house, many closets, my garage. They are stacked high by my bedside, on the hamper in the upstairs bathroom, in the backseat of my car. I take a book with me most places I go. I buy books all the time but I have gotten a litt...
His poems make me smile, sad, introspective, happy, pensive, feel alive. But most of all they make me want to write better poetry myself. How can you not love this:THE TROUBLE WITH POETRYThe trouble with poetry, I realized as I walked along a beach one night -- cold Florida sand under my bare fee...
I'd read all of Collins's collections except for this one and the most recent.I can say I enjoyed the book in a very general way, but I'm left thinking: Hmmm... Isn't this a little dumbed-down? Is it really what I think of when I think (eek!) "poetry"? I generally like early Collins better than ...
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 s...
Bartlett's Poems for Occasions, an entertaining, thought-provoking companion to the bestselling Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, is the book to turn to for any circumstance-from birth to death and everything in between. Under the direction of esteemed poet and writer Geoffrey O'Brien, Bartlett's P...
Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning— the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial— consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words. They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are, or following the smell of c...
They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth— the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, the American poets gazing out at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise. The clerks are at their desks, the miners are down in their mines, and the poets are looking out their windows may...
No wonder she kept cocking her head as I went on about “summer movies” and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots. I was standing and she was sitting on a dim street in front of a butcher shop, and come to think of it, she could have been waiting for the early morning return of the lambs and th...
The fellow may be gazing over an English landscape, hillsides dotted with sheep, a row of tall trees topping the downs, or he could be moping through the shadows of a dark Bavarian forest, a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales tucked into his rucksack. But the feeling is always the same. ...
I remember how I would wince whenever a student, wishing to be respectful, would refer to “Mr. Frost,” “Mr. Hemingway,” or, worse yet, “Mr. Shakespeare.” Just write “Hemingway” or “Frost,” I would tell them, the way you would with a ballplayer like Jeter or Brady. No one writes “Mr. Jeter stole s...