(no subject)
Words of joy and woe
A poet's charming everyday trifles mingle with deep reflections on darker subjects
BY MICHAEL HETTICH
In his new collection, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins offers charming, witty anecdotes that occasionally plumb the deeper currents running beneath their evocations of ''toast in the toaster'' and ''a cold bottle of beer on the back terrace.'' These meandering, self-satisfied, gently self-mocking poems are as enjoyable and undemanding as light conversation with intelligent friends, or a sip of good champagne.
Occasionally in The Trouble with Poetry Collins challenges himself -- and his large audience -- with genuinely probing poems that, though still accessible, sound darker, more haunting harmonies. These poems redeem an otherwise forgettable book.
Collins' poems are mostly spoken by an affable, slightly befuddled narrator who delights in anecdotes of ordinary life that strive to reveal the mystery at the heart of life, this ''light toss of circumstance'' in which we find ourselves. A typical poem, The Long Day, starts ''In the morning I ate a banana/ like a young ape/ and worked on a poem called `Nocturne.'//In the afternoon I opened the mail/ with a short kitchen knife . . . '' to end with the narrator befuddled by his own thoughts, soaking in a ''claw footed bath'' wondering ''why z, which looks like/ the fastest letter/ come(s) at the very end'' of the alphabet. The Flying Notebook imagines the poet's notebook flying over his head while he sleeps, ``once swooping so low/ as to ripple the surface of a lake/ in a dream in which I happen to be drowning.''
As in his previous books, Collins' rhythms are closer to those of conversational prose than of verse, and these poems contain little variation in voice, rhythm or tone. Too many of the poems in The Trouble with Poetry, while entertaining, are marred by a cuteness that strives to pass as revelation: ''Because tomorrow/I will turn 420 in dog years,/I've decided to take myself/ for a long walk on the path around the lake// and when I get back to the house,/I will jump up on my chest/and lick my nose, my ears and eyelids/ while I tell myself again and again to get down. . . .'' (Care and Feeding).
Unlike the best poetry, these poems grow less interesting with each successive reading. There are, however, a number of poems here that resist easy solutions to the imagined situations they set themselves. In an uncharacteristically personal voice, the narrator of the title poem tells us of ``an image I stole directly/from Lawrence Ferlingetti --/to be perfectly honest for a moment --// . . . whose little amusement park of a book/ I carried in a side pocket of my uniform/ up and down the treacherous halls of high school.''
The Trouble with Poetry is filled with meditations that meander from their main subjects to become, in a sense, anti-meditations or portraits of a mind avoiding itself. One of the pleasures of reading Collins is following his narrator's digressive mind as it moves across the landscape of the domestic world we share with him. In some of the most interesting and successful poems here, however, Collins develops his ideas in less whimsical, more focused and ultimately more moving ways. In Bereft, he imagines death as a place where there are ``no more bees chasing you around the garden/ . . . no more moon on the glimmering water,/no cool breast felt beneath an open robe.//More like an empty zone that souls traverse. . . . /a reign of silence except for. . . . //the sound of the newcomers weeping.''
The final poem in The Trouble with Poetry is a meditation on silence that never flinches from its subject:
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a motionless player on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
and the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house --
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
Such moments of honest writing remind us that Collins is, in fact, a poet of considerable power and grace.
______________________
Michael Hettich teaches at Miami Dade College.
A poet's charming everyday trifles mingle with deep reflections on darker subjects
BY MICHAEL HETTICH
In his new collection, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins offers charming, witty anecdotes that occasionally plumb the deeper currents running beneath their evocations of ''toast in the toaster'' and ''a cold bottle of beer on the back terrace.'' These meandering, self-satisfied, gently self-mocking poems are as enjoyable and undemanding as light conversation with intelligent friends, or a sip of good champagne.
Occasionally in The Trouble with Poetry Collins challenges himself -- and his large audience -- with genuinely probing poems that, though still accessible, sound darker, more haunting harmonies. These poems redeem an otherwise forgettable book.
Collins' poems are mostly spoken by an affable, slightly befuddled narrator who delights in anecdotes of ordinary life that strive to reveal the mystery at the heart of life, this ''light toss of circumstance'' in which we find ourselves. A typical poem, The Long Day, starts ''In the morning I ate a banana/ like a young ape/ and worked on a poem called `Nocturne.'//In the afternoon I opened the mail/ with a short kitchen knife . . . '' to end with the narrator befuddled by his own thoughts, soaking in a ''claw footed bath'' wondering ''why z, which looks like/ the fastest letter/ come(s) at the very end'' of the alphabet. The Flying Notebook imagines the poet's notebook flying over his head while he sleeps, ``once swooping so low/ as to ripple the surface of a lake/ in a dream in which I happen to be drowning.''
As in his previous books, Collins' rhythms are closer to those of conversational prose than of verse, and these poems contain little variation in voice, rhythm or tone. Too many of the poems in The Trouble with Poetry, while entertaining, are marred by a cuteness that strives to pass as revelation: ''Because tomorrow/I will turn 420 in dog years,/I've decided to take myself/ for a long walk on the path around the lake// and when I get back to the house,/I will jump up on my chest/and lick my nose, my ears and eyelids/ while I tell myself again and again to get down. . . .'' (Care and Feeding).
Unlike the best poetry, these poems grow less interesting with each successive reading. There are, however, a number of poems here that resist easy solutions to the imagined situations they set themselves. In an uncharacteristically personal voice, the narrator of the title poem tells us of ``an image I stole directly/from Lawrence Ferlingetti --/to be perfectly honest for a moment --// . . . whose little amusement park of a book/ I carried in a side pocket of my uniform/ up and down the treacherous halls of high school.''
The Trouble with Poetry is filled with meditations that meander from their main subjects to become, in a sense, anti-meditations or portraits of a mind avoiding itself. One of the pleasures of reading Collins is following his narrator's digressive mind as it moves across the landscape of the domestic world we share with him. In some of the most interesting and successful poems here, however, Collins develops his ideas in less whimsical, more focused and ultimately more moving ways. In Bereft, he imagines death as a place where there are ``no more bees chasing you around the garden/ . . . no more moon on the glimmering water,/no cool breast felt beneath an open robe.//More like an empty zone that souls traverse. . . . /a reign of silence except for. . . . //the sound of the newcomers weeping.''
The final poem in The Trouble with Poetry is a meditation on silence that never flinches from its subject:
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a motionless player on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
and the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house --
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
Such moments of honest writing remind us that Collins is, in fact, a poet of considerable power and grace.
______________________
Michael Hettich teaches at Miami Dade College.