Book Jacket
Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, the verbal gifts that earned him the title "America's most popular poet" are on full display. The poems here cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union. With simple diction and effortless turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac, as in the opening lines of the title poem:
Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.
Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you...
And in this reflection on his own transience:
It doesn't take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soapbubble floating over the children's party.
Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.
Smart, lyrical, and not afraid to be funny, these new poems extend Collins's reputation as a poet who occupies a special place in tehc onsciousness of readers of poetry, including the many he has converted to the genre.
Review
Eh. Not much in this collection of poems made me stop and think...anything. It wasn't bad poetry, but neither was it great. Probably I didn't give any of the poems enough time to really sink in. But leaving this book, I found myself wanting to return to Shakespeare's sonnets or the one Wilde poem I've read.
Still, there was some good stuff to be found. I absolutely adored Collins's picture of writer's block: "I must have picked up the wrong pen/ The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink." And the poem about his discovery that his dog didn't have cancer was kind of beautiful.
Two out of five bike rides through the graveyard.
Release Date: April 2011
Reading Level: Grade 7+
Where In Dunlap Public Library's Collection: Not yet a part of Dunlap's collection.
Don't believe me? Check out these reviews of Horoscopes for the Dead:
The Agony Column
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