Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems [Paperback]

Billy Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2002

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection hit the front page of the New York Times its first time out of the blocks in 1999, as the University of Pittsburgh Press, Collins's longtime publisher, denied Random the rights to the poems as the poet tried to jump ship. The two houses and Collins's agent, Chris Calhoun (Dan Menaker is Collins's editor at Random), later worked out a deal that gave Pitt a few more months to ride Picnic, Lightning (1998) and Collins's other books without this culling treading on its sales. As it now appears, the book includes 23 poems from Picnic, more than from any of Collins's previous three books included here. (Work from the early Video Poems and Pokerface is absent.) Collins's poems are generally conveyed by a speaker whose genial, highly literate analogue of earnestness perfectly produces inchoate quotidian restlessness matched by fear-based appreciation of the mundane. A typical Collins poem begins with "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer," "The way the dog trots out the front door" or the observation that "It is possible to be struck by a meteor/ or a single-engine plane/ while reading in a chair at home" and continues by juxtaposing, say, close descriptions of "the instant hand of Death" and "the rasp of the steel edge/ against a round stone,/ the small plants singing/ with lifted faces." It's a formula that has worked well for Collins, and he does not abandon it in the 20 new poems here. (On-sale date: Sept. 11) Forecast: A reading on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion was the beginning of serious sales for Picnic, Lightning (40,000 copies and counting), while The Art of Drowning has sold 26,000 since 1995, and Questions About Angels clocks in at 21,000 since 1991. Collins's reading tours for this book should help reach even more readers, and some browsers may remember the Times story.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This new volume from the newly appointed poet laureate of the United States has survived the publishing rights war between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press. The wait has been well worth it. The surface structure of these poems appears simplistic, but subtle changes in tone or gesture move the reader from the mundane to the sublime. In an attempt to sleep, the speaker in "Insomnia" moves from counting sheep to envisioning Noah's arc to picturing "all the fish in creation/ leaping a fence in a field of water,/ one colorful species after another." Collins will tackle any topic: his subject matter varies from snow days to Aristotle to forgetfulness. The results are accessible but not trite, comical but not laughable, and well crafted but not overly flamboyant. Collins relies heavily on imagery, which becomes the cornerstone of the entire volume, and his range of diction brings such a polish to these poems that the reader is left feeling that this book "once opened, can never be closed." This volume belongs in everyone's library; highly recommended. Tim Gavin, Episcopa Acad., Merion, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (September 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375755195
• ISBN-13: 978-0375755194
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #81 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Poetry

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful poetry for people ambivalent about poety., October 1, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

I'm one of those readers who finds most poetry to be maddenly opaque, filled with mostly ambiguous and meaningless words. Dante's Inferno is a masterpiece, but he gave us something to sink our teeth into. Some of Robert Frost's poems are wonderful. But most poetry leaves me frustrated and unfulfilled. I don't blame the poets or the poems--they just don't do it for me. Give me some good, meaty prose, something with a real plot and strong sinewy words to chew on, and I'm a happy reader.

Then someone suggested I give Billy Collins a try, so I invested $20+ on his recent collection entitled "Sailing Around the Room." (mostly poems from his prior collections, but with twenty or so new ones).

What can I say? In the two days since I bought this volume, I've read each of the poems several times. Collins is humorous, insightful, and even his ambiguities are delicious. But beneath the humor lies some deep insights into humanity, a sense of sadness amid our passage through life (the last lines in "November" are heartbreaking). Many of his poems are wry commentaries on the creative process.

If you've ever owned a dog, his "Dharma" is a revelation, you'll gain a new appreciation for snow from reading "Snow" or "Snow Day," you'll never look at someone listening to a disc player the same way after you've read "Man Listening to Disc," and you'll never pick up a Victoria's Secret catalog again without examining it through the humorous eyes of "Victoria's Secret."

I loved this volume and I'll read it over and over. It's everything I have described above, but above all things, it's wise. Collins has enough of life under his belt to understand its humor, its tragedy, its joy, and its rhythms. And he has the voice to make it all real for the reader.

Even if you hate poetry, buy this book.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky poetry., October 9, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Billy Collins is an English professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College. He is also the 2001-2002 Poet Laureate of the United States. This 96-poem collection is the definitive volume of Billy Collins' work to date. It includes selected poetry from his four previous books, THE APPLE THAT ASTONISHED PARIS, QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS, THE ART OF DROWNING, and PICNIC, LIGHTNING (1988-1998), together with twenty new poems. It is a captivating collection of poetry that I enjoyed reading cover to cover.

Quirky. Wry. Amazing. Fun. Witty. Easy. These are some of the words that describe Collins' poetry. He has a knack for revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. In "Questions About Angels," he writes, "Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?/ Do they swing like children from the hinges/ of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?/ Do they sit alone in gardens changing colors?" (p. 24). In "The Dead," he observes, "The dead are always looking down on us, they say,/ while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,/ They are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven/ as they row themselves slowly through eternity" (p. 33). "Each one is a gift, no doubt," he writes in "Days," "mysteriously placed in your waking hand/ or set upon your forehead/ moments before you open your eyes" (p. 57). In one of my favorite Collins' poems, "Dharma," he writes, "The way the dog trots out the front door/ every morning/ without a hat or an umbrella/ without any money/ or the keys to her doghouse/ never fails to fill the saucer of my heart/ with milky admiration" (p. 137).

Other poems here contemplate insomnia (pp. 10; 142), Collins' "best cigarette" (p. 55), marginalia (p. 94), shovelling snow with Buddha (p. 103), perusing a Victoria's Secret catalog (p. 109), and undressing Emily Dickinson (p. 119). Those readers who appreciate good wine, good books, and good jazz will discover a kindred spirit in Billy Collins. Perhaps Collins describes the effect of reading his poetry best in "Picnic, Lightning": "It is possible to be struck by a meteor/ or a single-engine plane/ while reading in a chair at home" (p. 98).

G. Merritt

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly devoid of tweed and pomp, September 15, 2001

By 

Taylor M. Mali "No Holds Bard" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

If you haven't bought a book of poetry in a while (or, perhaps, ever), Billy Collins's most recent collection is a good choice. His poems are unfailingly accessible and entertaining, so easy to read they make poetry look as if it's easy to write. Collins abhors lofty, incomprehensible verse and yet manages to reconcile his down home persona with an obvious love of good wine, good jazz, and reference books of varying sizes. I'm off now to the park with my dog, my coffee, and my copy of Billy Collins.