Customer Reviews

Questions About Angels (Pitt Poetry Series)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I only happened to come across Billy Collins by sheer accident at the bookstore. Curious, I pulled it out and began to read. I, a T.S. Eliot fanatic, was struck down by the absence of those very things I love about Eliot. Collins has a deceptively simple style bereft of even the vaguest trace of poetic posturing. He is not obsessed with language and never picks a word just for the echoes it might produce. One thing I noticed while reading the other reviews of this book was the repition of the word 'accessible,' so I'm not the only one to believe that Collins can be argued about at the dinner table while you're waiting for dessert to be brought out. (Of course, at that point dessert may just never get brought out.) This does not mean that Collins has a 'point' he wishes to express with each poem. On the contrary, each poem leaves a distinct aftertaste that lingers in those deliciously ripe moments after you close the book for a second to savor what you have just finished reading. It is this blend of philosophy and beauty that draws you into his poetry and makes you hunger for more.

Several weeks ago I first discovered Billy Collins. A newspaper article had a quotation where he discussed the fact that he uses subjects and predicates when writing poetry. This peculiar poetic quirk led me to go online to discover that poetry. There I found the poem "Nostalgia", which is included in this book.

I read it, enjoyed it, passed it on to friends. Then a strange thing happened - lines from Nostalgia kept cropping up in my memory. Each time it happened, I gained a deeper respect for the poem. I read and reread my cut-and-paste copy of Nostalgia. Finally, the only possible result occurred - I bought the book that contained it. A book filled with similar marvels.

Reviewers far more renowned that I have already given incredible praise to Billy Collin's work. I'm a pretty ordinary person. I've never studied so that I know all the "proper" elements of a poem. So what can I add that hasn't already been said? I can add that Billy Collins reaches people like me. He takes our ordinary, everyday experiences and looks at them with magic eyes. He sees - and says - the things we all want to feel about life and its infinite possibilities.

Above all, he makes me feel good about my life and my world. I urge you to explore the Collins world - to get that same surge of energy that I have experienced.

I missed the final guest editor's cut with a batch of poems sent to Alaska Quarterly Review, finding out only later that that editor was Billy Collins. Still, he is one of only a few modern poets that I not only buy for myself, but buy for gifts. People who didn't think they even liked poetry have their little peepers blown wide open by this guy. Simple clear language, luminous imagery, and the generous sort of humor that protects sensitive souls from despair. This is poetry that communicates love of language, love of ideas, and love for the reader. Billy, write me, this is a dinner invitation.

I don't read too much poetry anymore, I'm too short of time to spend it checking an encyclopedia to understand who the poet is talking about. Often today's poetry becomes a contest between the writer and reader as to who knows the most about ancient Greeks or Babylonia. But along comes Billy Collins, a poet who speaks my language. I related immediately with the subject of his poem, "Forgetfulness". The second stanza describes familiar struggles, "as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones." As I reach the golden years, memories are replaced with a keen awareness of mortality. The author's final stanza in "The Afterlife", reinforces my personal belief that the small pleasures of life are the important ones. Speaking of the hopes of those existing in the state of afterlife; "wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees...". My wish, is that Billy Collins keeps us all laughing and enjoying his poetry for many years, and books, to come.

After reading Picnic, Lightning and loving it, I went searching for more of Collins' work. "Questions About Angels" did not disappoint. While I believe that Picnic is a more polished and more accessible collection of poems, "Angels" left me with many favorites and with the continued amazement at how Collins' language can cut so deeply to the heart of so many matters. He remains my favorite contemporary poet and I would encourage anyone with a love for language to give him a try.

This book was a gift to me, and I am grateful to the giver.
She knows that I need stuff that makes sense!
That's one of the things I like most about this collection, it makes sense. It is accessible to the somewhat poetically challenged (as I consider myself to be). But beyond this... just the use of the words, the FIT of the words, the powerful (yet subtle) sort of surreptitious little attack in the end of each poem, always making the reader go... "Hmmm".
Collins is a wordsmith, and exquisitely so. Satisfying. He is to the typewriter what Bruce Hornsby is to the piano. You listen to both, and when they're done their thing, you say to yourself "It would be very difficult to have done that any better."

Billy Collins makes me feel like everything is a poem waiting to happen. This is because he chooses a lot of common occurrence, simple things to write about. Stuff like spending an afternoon examining ancient maps in a library while the rain falls outside. Or stopping to pick wisteria from the side of the road. Waking up with a wicked hangover. Kafka picking up a pen and promptly changing you into a goldfish or a lost mitten, or (better yet) the New York Public Library. How about having your own faithful table lamp showing up at your funeral... "like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord / the small circle of mourners parting to make room."
Wonderful stuff. Everyday stuff like that.
He's witty and terse; thematically timeless / He's all in free verse, and totally rhymeless.
4.5 exploding stars!

I used to read only classical poetry, but then a friend of mine told me about this poem called "Questions About Angels" and when I read it, the poem blew me away. Quickly purchasing the book, I went home and read it cover to cover. Collins has created a living being in this book, expanding on old concepts and making them new, while creating many of his own as well. All who enjoy modern poetry will love this book, and all who enjoy classical poetry will find in it the beauty they love merged with a realism that will leave them spell bound.

"I suppose I might be different from previous poet laureates by kind of emphasizing the playful or even screwball aspects of poetry." ~Billy Collins

Poetry can increase our capacity for viewing the world as a colorful, imaginative landscape of crisp words and vibrant images. In "Questions About Angels," Billy Collins presents the world in an almost animated fashion. At times his words glide across your mind like slow moving images in a movie or a long sweep of a lens. At other times, the "movie" is highly animated and takes on bizarre characteristics.

The first few poems flew by my mind. I was aware of the content of the poems, they were observations, memories of childhood. However, it wasn't until I reached "Reading Myself to Sleep" that I made a connection. While I had enjoyed the endings of the first few poems, suddenly, I was relating to emotions and images I had experienced.

"Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then slip drowsily under the surface of a page"

Then, I started to notice a unique imaginative twist to many of the poems and even an occasional tendency towards the macabre in "Purity." Billy Collins seems to see himself in an animated world where the laws of life and death don't always apply. While "Purity" is rather comical and shows a tongue-in-cheek attitude to the freedom he might be experiencing in his writing, "The Wires of the Night" is a solemn animation of death. While the skeleton in "Purity" is free, "Death" soaks itself into the poets mind and seems to present an instability and then a calm release from thought.

I had to smile while reading "Wolf" because it was just rather cute. We find a wolf reading a fairy tale and later in the evening he is found knocking over houses with his breath. I am sure this poem has a much deeper meaning. Devouring words and then acting upon them or perhaps words setting us into action or leading us to our fate.

While Billy Collins often seems to paint cartoons on the canvas of our minds ("Love in the Sahara" where a camel leaves a pack of cigarettes was rather comical) with a magical twist, the moment of brilliance, for me at least, was on page 70. He is describing himself as the New York Public Library.

"I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies."

What more can I say? This book lover has been charmed.

~The Rebecca Review

Billy Collins, in musing to himself, and recording what he thinks about ordinary objects and surroundings, draws us into the process of poetry in an extraordinarily reassuring way, as if to say, "See, it's a marvel, but it's not so difficult to open up a new dimension. Just follow the train of your intelligent mind, and let us in on it!" This kind of poetry is what ordinary Americans need in a poet laureate--accessible, but opening new windows to the world of thought and feeling.

author of DREAMING YOUR REAL SELF, DREAM BACK YOUR LIFE, and WHO'S CRAZY, ANYWAY?

Billy Collins takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. His juxtaposition of images and ideas is whimsical, surprising, and always delightful--from the simple act of weighing his dog to a single angel dancing on the head of a pin in time with the music of a jazz combo. This is poetry to read aloud, to let it touch you deeply, to make you laugh and wish you could write and see the world as he does. Prepare to be captivated by his flights of imagination without struggling to understand.