Billy Collins

We have become beautiful without even knowing it.





I am happy to say that I now know some of the work of U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Nick Gough turned me to The Art of Drowning, a collection whose title poem scoffs at the old notion of life-flashing-before-your-eyes. He seems to muse that there is some senseless anxiety at work—“crushing decades in the vice of your final desperate seconds.”

To me, there doesn’t seem to be anything ill-considered in Collins’ poems. He exalts the mundane, the pleasurable, the simple, and does it with a smile on his face. He pokes fun at how art seems to be a vehicle of sadness or regret or escape. He is unafraid to communicate satisfaction. After a meal of risotto and wine...

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair
a creature with a full stomach—
something you don’t hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter
but tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest
...
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water,drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

I love that his dreams aren’t rising us higher still over such and such…but makes the point that we are descending into someplace "below," trying to return to a sense of happiness that lies deep within us, not in some foreign country celestialized in the clouds of an unknown horizon.

There are some great poems in this book. I love “Death Beds,” “On Turning Ten,” and “Conversion.” The narrator in the latter, after listening for months to only one story, a parable of lost sheep or blighted vineyard, he says,

Then I would remove my helmet of opinions
and walk into the public streets
revealing the soft brown mushroom of my new head.

At this point he steps back from his months of study and looks at things in new ways even still. To me this arrives at an essential essence of poetry and spirituality. The open mind continually grasping for greater light, and ever willing to remove our helmets of opinion to take anew that fresh and frightening look.