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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him "America's favorite poet."
The Rain in Portugal --a title that admits he's not much of a rhymer--sheds Collins's ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical--"the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they're in Minneapolis"--to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.
Praise for The Rain in Portugal
"Nothing in Billy Collins's twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that's the charm of this collection." -- The Washington Post
"This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin." -- Library Journal
"Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid." -- Booklist
Author Notes
Billy Collins has published six collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels and The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, his latest, sold more than 25,000 copies in its first year. He teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York and at Sarah Lawrence College. He was named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2000.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Collins (Aimless Love) returns with 60 typically on-brand poems of wandering, observing, and experiencing brief moments of profundity. There are elements of darkness and political awareness ("the piece/ on the morning radio about the former asylum/ whose inmates were kept busy/ at wooden benches in a workshop/ making leather collars and wristbands/ that would later be used to restrain them"), but mostly there's the Collins his devoted readership knows in poems such as "Not So Still Life," wherein "With the skull inching toward the pear,/ and the cluster of eggs beginning to wander,/ I had to reassure myself/ that my mother and father were still alive,/ I had a place to stay/ and a couple thousand dollars in a savings account." Collins's allure has always been in short, talky poems that deal with poetry's big subjects: life, death, and poetry ("Poetry is too busy thinking about her children/ as she replaces a gold button on the blazer of Pride"). Once again Collins delivers, musing about his students, taking a walk around a lake, and reflecting on music history: "see Keith standing/ on the shoulders of the other Rolling Stones,/ who are in turn standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,/ who, were it not for that endless stack of turtles.../ would find himself standing on nothing at all." (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Collins, whose last three collections have ascended the New York Times best sellers list, is a relative rarity among modern poets; he commands a wide readership and enviable publishers' contracts. This new collection shows him at his finest in poems such as "Greece"-amusing, even-toned, and fully in touch with the implied motifs of antiquity, time, art, and mortality as he calls his craft "a megaphone held up/ to the whispering lips of death" before rushing to join bathers at the beach. Overall, Collins's voice and approach vary little, and he can, in less successful poems, be twee, prosy, or banal. Nor will his basic method be satisfactory to readers who demand verbal density or the postromantic-cum-surreal style that has prevailed in American poetry for the past 30 years. Still, Collins's popularity shouldn't deceive us into thinking that he doesn't have the real stuff of the poet. VERDICT Another worthwhile collection from two-time Poet Laureate Collins, certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin, with at least half a dozen poems as fine as any he has written thus far.-Graham Christian, formerly with Andover--Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
-- Excerpted from The Rain in Portugal: Poems by Billy Collins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
1 1960 | p. 3 |
Lucky Cat | p. 5 |
Only Child | p. 7 |
The Night of the Fallen Limb | p. 9 |
Greece | p. 11 |
Basho in Ireland | p. 12 |
Not So Still Life | p. 14 |
Cosmology | p. 16 |
Dream Life | p. 18 |
Hendrik Goltzius's "Icarus" (1588) | p. 20 |
The Money Note | p. 22 |
Helium | p. 24 |
Weathervane | p. 26 |
Species | p. 27 |
The Bard in Flight | p. 29 |
Sirens | p. 31 |
Predator | p. 33 |
Traffic | p. 34 |
Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John's Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers | p. 35 |
The Present | p. 36 |
2 On Rhyme | p. 41 |
The Five Spot, 1964 | p. 42 |
2128 | p. 43 |
Bags of Time | p. 45 |
One Leg of the Journey | p. 47 |
A Restaurant in Moscow | p. 49 |
Tanager | p. 51 |
Santorini | p. 52 |
Bravura | p. 54 |
Muybridge's Lobsters | p. 56 |
Portrait | p. 58 |
Early Morning | p. 60 |
Child Lost at the Beach | p. 62 |
In Praise of Ignorance | p. 64 |
Microscopic Pants | p. 65 |
Many Moons | p. 67 |
Note to J. Alfred Prufrock | p. 69 |
Speed Walking on August 31, 2013 | p. 70 |
December 1st | p. 71 |
3 Genuflection | p. 75 |
Thanksgiving | p. 77 |
Under the Stars | p. 79 |
Mister Shakespeare | p. 81 |
The Influence of Anxiety: a Term Paper | p. 83 |
Goats | p. 85 |
The Day After Tomorrow | p. 87 |
A Day in May | p. 89 |
The Lake | p. 91 |
Solvitur Ambulando | p. 92 |
Fire | p. 94 |
Bachelorette Party | p. 96 |
Oh, Lonesome Me | p. 97 |
Meditation | p. 99 |
Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language | p. 101 |
What a Woman Said to Me After a Reading in the Napa Valley | p. 103 |
Joy | p. 104 |
Acknowledgments | p. 107 |