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Billy Collins

Biography

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including WATER, WATER; MUSICAL TABLES; WHALE DAY; THE RAIN IN PORTUGAL; AIMLESS LOVE; HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD; BALLISTICS; THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY; NINE HORSES; SAILING ALONE AROUND THE ROOM; QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS; THE ART OF DROWNING; and PICNIC, LIGHTNING. He is also the editor of POETRY 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 MORE: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and BRIGHT WINGS: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds.

A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife, Suzannah.

Billy Collins

Books by Billy Collins

Water, Water: Poems
by Billy Collins - Poetry, Poetry Collection

In this collection of 60 new poems, Billy Collins writes about the beauties and ironies of everyday experience. A poem is best, he feels, when it begins in clarity but ends with a whiff of mystery. In WATER, WATER, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar.

Musical Tables: Poems
by Billy Collins - Poetry, Poetry Collection

You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. In his own words, his poems tend to “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Now Collins has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here he writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity and love --- all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. The poems in MUSICAL TABLES are inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’ recognizable wit and wisdom.

Whale Day: And Other Poems
by Billy Collins - Poetry, Poetry Collection

This new collection brings together more than 50 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’ reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.

The Rain in Portugal: Poems
by Billy Collins - Poetry, Poetry Collection

THE RAIN IN PORTUGAL --- a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer --- sheds Billy Collins’ 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, here Collins 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.