Whale day: and other poems

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Random House
Publication Date
©2020.
Language
English

Description

A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal “The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday.”—The Wall Street JournalWhale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.

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ISBN
9780593241134
9780399589751

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Published Reviews

Booklist Review

As in his previous, beloved poetry collections, Collins (The Rain in Portugal, 2016) encapsulates life with both bonhomie and mordancy. Observing in his seventh decade that he has entered "the quiet cardigan harbor of my life," he offers pared down, courtly, and wistful poems, but Collins still ambushes the reader with clashes between the profound and the prosaic. The poet somberly records the names of his dead, then later uses the reverse side of the paper to jot down a shopping list. A poet of home and habit, writing of coffee and pets, Collins is also a world traveler, offering striking impressions of different lands and recording poignant and exhilarating time travels, including a return to his father's clattering, smoky 1950s office. His free-roaming imagination even carries him down into the hidden world of whales, who inspire the title poem's question, "So is it too much to ask that one day a year / be set aside for keeping in mind / . . . the multitude of these mammoth creatures." Collins delights, skewers, and enlightens.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Booklist Reviews

As in his previous, beloved poetry collections, Collins (The Rain in Portugal, 2016) encapsulates life with both bonhomie and mordancy. Observing in his seventh decade that he has entered "the quiet cardigan harbor of my life," he offers pared down, courtly, and wistful poems, but Collins still ambushes the reader with clashes between the profound and the prosaic. The poet somberly records the names of his dead, then later uses the reverse side of the paper to jot down a shopping list. A poet of home and habit, writing of coffee and pets, Collins is also a world traveler, offering striking impressions of different lands and recording poignant and exhilarating time travels, including a return to his father's clattering, smoky 1950s office. His free-roaming imagination even carries him down into the hidden world of whales, who inspire the title poem's question, "So is it too much to ask that one day a year / be set aside for keeping in mind / . . . the multitude of these mammoth creatures." Collins delights, skewers, and enlightens. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.
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LJ Express Reviews

In his 13th collection, former U.S. Poet Laureate Collins presents poems that strike a balance between fact and fiction, description and whimsy. Travel, friendship, love, and walking an aged dog are all topics here, but a significant number focus on mortality—whether the poet's own or that of friends and relatives. Their tone is often light, but beneath the humor is a quest to understand what happens before dying and after; one riffs on cremains, opining that "Scattering is the option du jour." At heart, Collins is a storyteller, as showcased in "Downpour," whose speaker writes the names of recently deceased friends on the back of a shopping list. Leaving the supermarket, he suddenly realizes he forgot Terry O'Shea and the bananas and bread: "And that is when I set out,/ …walking as if in a procession honoring the dead." Some poems miss the mark, as in a poem that quotes Cézanne's wonderful observation that "a single carrot,/ if painted in a completely fresh way,/ would be enough to set off a revolution" but too predictably leaps to Bugs Bunny and Beatrix Potter. Yet the best poems offer moments of sheer magic that take readers to places never imagined. VERDICT Not Collins's best collection but a solid one that all libraries will want for its emotional resonance during difficult times.—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Copyright 2020 LJExpress.

Copyright 2020 LJExpress.
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