authors resting on their dark shelves. The second stanza pictures a man in the act of reading; he is “a man in two worlds”—the physical world in which he lives as well as the book’s world of imagination. The third stanza recalls the narrator’s mother, reading to him in a voice that offered him the same duality. The mother’s voice was both her own and at the same time the vehicle of the frightening events of the story. The narrator finally imagines “all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves.” The words become like “a trail of crumbs,” the trail that the reader follows into the forest of the book.

“Death” is constructed similarly. From its abstract title, Collins moves swiftly to imagining how the news of a death in the family traveled in the past and then describes the telephone as the modern means of delivering bad news. Telephones are everywhere; the reader can almost hear one ringing—“ready to summon you, ready to fall from your hand.”

Many of the poems in the volume are shorter than those in Collins’s later work, but they foreshadow many of his later themes and subjects—visits to Tuscany and Ireland; the imaginative creation of a town called “Schoolsville,” peopled by all the students the speaker has ever taught; a miniature world history, an organization that Collins uses often, in “Personal History,” where the speaker courts his love from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution only to end up in this postmodern age, driving with her to the movie theater in a Volkswagen.

Questions About Angels

Questions About Angels seems to move to a level beyond that of The Apple That Astonished Paris while still using themes and subjects familiar to Collins’s readers. The writer’s voice also continues in its range of irony, meditation, and amusement. In this volume, however, the humor often leads to a more sharply serious conclusion. “Forgetfulness,” for example, seems at first to be a humorous consideration of what happens to one’s memory in middle age:

 The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read,  never even heard of.

Collins goes on to catalog other things one might forget—the names of the Muses, the order of the planets, the address of a relative. They are so completely lost that it is as if they have retired to a remote fishing village “where there are no phones.” The list and its attendant images are funny, but the poem concludes on a suddenly melancholy note: “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”

“First Reader” offers a similar experience, beginning comically with a picture of Dick and Jane, characters from the popular series of elementary school readers in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Collins calls them “the boy and girl who begin fiction,” for that is how they functioned for children learning to read. Collins quotes a line of frequent dialogue from those school texts.“Look!” Dick and Jane constantly command each other, “pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father.” At the end, Collins puns on the word “look”; even as children, with our growing literacy “we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.”

The title poem of this volume exemplifies a quality Collins admires in poems—the ending that leads the reader in a direction that was not forecast by the opening. Collins has said that too often writers overplan their poems, leaving no room for imagination to begin work during the process of composition. “Questions About Angels” opens with the old question from medieval theology: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Collins labels that the only question that is ever asked about angels and offers other possibilities, questions about how angels spend their time, what their clothes are made of, particulars about their flight. Then the poem returns to the pinhead and suggests that the answer is that only one angel can dance there, an angel who Collins pictures as a jazz singer in a nightclub, one of Collins’s favorite subjects, where she is dancing forever.

The Art of Drowning

The Art of Drowning introduces a slight shift in Collins’s style—a movement to longer poems and a narrowing of subject matter. Several poems here rise from Collins’s interest in jazz, notably “Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales” and “Exploring the Coast of Birdland.” In “Nightclub,” Collins playfully works changes on the common musical idea that “You are so beautiful and I am a fool/ to be in love with you.” No one, he says, ever sings “you are a fool to be in love with me.” The poem concludes with the narrator performing a fantasy bebop solo that asserts “We are all so foolish// so damn foolish/ we have become beautiful without even knowing it.”

This volume also firmly establishes Collins’s sense of the beauty of the mundane, his nearly sacramental reverence for the ordinary delights of a good meal (“Osso Buco”) or the sight of a student writing an exam (“Monday Morning,” with its allusions to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning”). These events make him “feel like the secretary to the morning,” in “Tuesday, June 4, 1991,” whose task is to chronicle the weather, his coffee, the arrival of the house painters, and the antics of the new kitten, and in doing so, he seems to drench them in an almost holy light.

Picnic, Lightning

Picnic, Lightning continues with tones and subjects of The Art of Drowning. Again, Collins writes about the beauties of the day (“Shoveling Snow with Buddha,” “Morning,” “In the Room of a Thousand Miles”) and jazz (“I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ’Three Blind Mice’”). What seems new in this volume is the number of poems that make specific reference to other literary works. As a literature teacher, Collins naturally refers to others’ writings in all his collections, but in Picnic, Lightning the reader finds Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” in Collins’s “Moon,” W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” in “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited,” and a whole array of writers in “Marginalia,” to name a few examples. “Paradelle for Susan” makes another literary reference as Collins creates a new verse form, a loopy combination of villanelle, pantoum, and sestina, to form a gentle spoof of a type of poem often produced in workshops (a subject he satirized more directly in the previous volume). “Paradelle” is accompanied by a mock-serious footnote outlining the form’s complex requirements. Overall, Picnic, Lightning feels very much like a second part of The Art of Drowning.

Sailing Alone Around the Room

Included in Sailing Alone Around the Room are twenty new poems as well as selections from four previous volumes: The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. In this collection, Collins continues his colloquial style, which avoids the difficulty of early twentieth century poetry and eludes affiliation with any contemporary school. Although much poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries consists of semantic ambiguity and an unclear sense of speaker or place, the poetry of Collins clearly situates the reader. “The Lesson” begins “In the morning when I found History/ snoring heavily on the couch,” and the opening to “The Iron Bridge” is even more explicit: “I am standing on a disused iron bridge/ that was erected in 1902.”

Such concrete orientation is an intentional feature of Collins’s aesthetic. It unites poet and reader by providing a stable jumping-off point. In “The Iron Bridge,” the poem’s explicit setting is a vehicle used to move back in time to the “. . . workmen in shirts and caps/ rivet[ing] this iron bridge together” to “my mother . . . so tiny” in 1902 in her mother’s kitchen. The poem then returns to the present with the image of a cormorant diving beneath the water under the bridge, then crescendos by pulling the past through the present and into the future by connecting the bird with “. . . my tiny mother,/ who disappeared last year,/ flying somewhere with your strange wings// kicking deeper down into a lake/ with no end or name. . . .” The solid platform that opens the poem is really a departure point for metaphysical exploration. Referencing author Henry Miller, Collins explains that the destination in his poetry is not a place but a new way of seeing things. This illuminates Collins’s description of his poetry as travel literature. “The Death of the Hat,” “The Butterfly Effect,” and “Madmen” are other examples that provide a new way of seeing.

The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems

Collins continues to be viewed by some as a jester who avoids serious contemplation in The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems. According to critic Anis Shivani, Collins maintains a trend he began in Nine Horses, abandoning the ideal reader for the average reader, whose literacy is inferior, and thereby losing the celestial music his poetry might otherwise have had. Others notice a gentle sadness in this volume. In a National Public Radio interview regarding The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems, Collins explained that poetry’s great subject is death. However, he goes on to say that this leads him to another great subject: gratitude for life. Poems such as “House” and “Theme” are examples of Collins’s ability to simultaneously express these themes. Alongside the dead one’s inevitable mortality, there is joy in the simple beauties of life. In “Flock,” Collins whimsically extends both of these themes by suggesting that death for some can actually be the gift, or the price, of beauty for others. He manages this observation without seeming dire by hiding the idea among a flock of sheep. Similarly in “Care and Feeding,” Collins disguises concern over turning seventy by imagining spending this birthday as his own pet dog. It is just this sort of caprice that readers seem to find either superficial or deft and profound.

Poet Louis McKee calls this volume rich and mischievous. “The Lanyard” is illustrative. It begins, characteristically for Collins, with the mundane act of chancing upon the word “lanyard” in the dictionary. There is mischief as this seemingly random introduction of the idea, and then the image, of the red and white plastic lanyard leads the reader, unexpectedly, to the fatuous comparison of this useless summer-camp product with all that a mother pours into her child over a lifetime.

   Here are thousands of meals, she said,   and here is clothing and a good education.   And here is your lanyard, I replied.

However, the poem is rich because it does not stop at the apparent insight that “you can never repay your mother.” Collins pushes on to question how it is that children, no matter their age, so often actually believe their negligible offerings are “enough to make us even.”

Ballistics

Called by one critic American poetry’s feel-good hit of the year, Ballistics builds on Collins’s well-established reputation as the author of lighthearted, easily accessible, often comic poetry. Poems in this vein, such as “Hippos on Holiday” and “Bathtub Families,” confirm the poet’s claim that he writes as a hedonist in search of linguistic pleasure. Most of the poems contain Collins’s characteristic colloquial language, subtle alliteration, and gentle cadences. Collins’s continued awareness of his reader is also evident in this volume. In the opening poem, “August in Paris,” the speaker bemoans the elusiveness of the reader: “But every time I turn around/ you have fled through a crease in the air.” Also evident here is Collins’s particular brand of irony, which leans much more toward delight than cynicism. The poem “Despair” does not despair but rather rejects the bleakness of much other poetry and urges celebration instead. Just as his other volumes contain parodies of other poets’ famous works (consider “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey” from Picnic, Lightning, a play on William Wordsworth’s well-known poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”), here Collins takes a jab at Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” with his “The Idea of Natural History at Key West.” However, more serious if not less whimsical creations are also a part of this work. In “The First Night,” Collins contemplates the darkness and silence of the first night of death. In “No Things,” he explores the relative merits of questioning the meaning of life versus simply enjoying it.

One thing that is perhaps new in Ballistics is a concision characteristic of much Eastern poetry. Just two years before the publication of this collection, Collins released a book of haiku. Its title, She Was Just Seventeen, puns on the seventeen syllables that compose this poetic form. Collins, in discussing Ballistics, has described his poems as extended haiku. Specifically, “China” and “Liu Yung” demonstrate the restraint, economy of language, and deeply evoked image that are characteristic of such poetry. “Divorce,” a poem of only four lines, is a stunning example:

    Once, two spoons in bed,    now tined forks    across a granite table    and the knives they have hired.

This poem retains Collins’s famous sense of humor while at the same time evoking the searing pain of a marriage ended.