Fountaindale Public Library

Musical tables, poems, Billy Collins

eng

no index present

poetry

Musical tables

1349226659

Billy Collins

poems

You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. In his own words, his poems tend to "begin in Kansas and end in Oz." Now "America's favorite poet" has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love - all in a handful of lines. "Whenever I pick up a new book of poems," says Collins, "I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short." Neither haiku nor limerickm the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins's recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems in this book show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career

adult