{"id":340,"date":"2012-03-08T23:40:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=340"},"modified":"2012-03-08T23:40:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:40:17","slug":"review-of-horoscopes-for-the-dead-by-billy-collins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/08\/review-of-horoscopes-for-the-dead-by-billy-collins\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Horoscopes for the Dead<\/em>\u00a0 by Billy Collins<\/p>\n

Random House (2011) $24\u00a0 (hardback)<\/p>\n

Reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n

Billy Collins\u2019 ninth collection of poetry pokes and prods the idea of mortality\u2014the author\u2019s as well as our own\u2014more than in any of his previous books. This one opens with a watchful speaker standing, \u201cbefore the joined grave of my parents,\u201d he tells us, and\u2014wait for it\u2014asking them what they think of his new glasses. With this loaded image of spectacles and the pseudo-serious author photo in which Collins pensively chews on what we presume are those new glasses, he\u2019s telling us he still sees the world in his characteristic playful way, but these days it\u2019s with a greater sense of life\u2019s transience that he sees the world. Indeed, Horoscopes<\/em> brims with the wry humor and colloquial language that have won Collins such a wide readership\u2014something that seldom happens for poets (unless you\u2019re a rock-star-turned-poet like Jewel or Billy Corgan).<\/p>\n

One of the best poems in Horoscopes for the Dead<\/em>\u2014an apt and catchy title if ever there was one\u2014is \u201cMemento Mori,\u201d which begins,<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take much to remind me<\/em>
\nwhat a mayfly I am,<\/em>
\nwhat a soap bubble floating over the children\u2019s party.<\/em><\/p>\n

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur<\/em>
\nin a museum does the trick every time<\/em>
\nor confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this book, we see a speaker having fun with the realization that he too has become the dinosaur, an old man wandering among \u201cthe fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus\u201d of the Florida he often mentions, musing in \u201cThe Flaneur,\u201d \u201cWho needs Europe?\u201d and then watching \u201c. . . as a boy flew by on a skateboard\/ and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth\/ and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.\u201d But the poem, \u201cHangover,\u201d is about as close as Collins gets to distress or anger as he decrees cantankerously that \u201cevery child who is playing Marco Polo\/ in the swimming pool of this motel\u201d should be required to read a thick biography of Marco Polo as well as several fine-printed histories of Venice and China. After that, he goes on,<\/p>\n

each child would be quizzed<\/em>
\nby me then executed by drowning<\/em>
\nregardless how much they managed<\/em>
\nto retain . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, is America\u2019s bestselling, most popular poet; he writes poems just about anyone can read and appreciate. Though he weathers some criticism for employing many of the same strategies over and over in his poems, we can begrudge him a bit of redundancy if the formula is working\u2014and of course, it still is. He looks out at the mutilated world with childlike fascination and clarity and makes music out of the quotidian, capturing universal experiences we perhaps didn\u2019t realize someone else was also having. More often than not, the pieces in Horoscopes for the Dead are occasioned by a man sitting alone on a rock, or on a dock, and staring out at a calm lake. And there are the usual poems about his dog, as well as a poem in which he predictably likens himself to a mouse, \u201cducking like a culprit\/ into an opening in a stone wall,\u201d and there\u2019s one poem\u2014one can scarcely call it a poem\u2014\u201cFeedback,\u201d which is all punch line and cutesiness:<\/p>\n

The woman who wrote from Phoenix<\/em>
\nafter my reading there<\/em><\/p>\n

to tell me they were all still talking about it<\/em><\/p>\n

just wrote again <\/em>
\nto tell me that they had stopped.<\/em><\/p>\n

But Collins shows us time and again in poems like \u201cArithmetic\u201d that he knows exactly what he\u2019s up to, and he\u2019s not afraid to repeat himself, letting his lines unfold slowly and tenderly for his readers so we too can see just where he\u2019s headed:<\/p>\n

I spend a little time nearly every day<\/em>
\non a gray wooden dock<\/em>
\non the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.<\/em><\/p>\n

And if there is nothing on my mind<\/em>
\nbut the motion of the wavelets<\/em>
\nand the high shape-shifting of clouds,<\/em><\/p>\n

I look out at the whole picture<\/em>
\nand divide the scene into what was here<\/em>
\nfive hundred years ago and what was not.<\/em><\/p>\n

It becomes apparent once more in this book that Collins is not just writing for the appreciation of other poets (as writers often do these days); his project is a poetics for the guy in the pickup, the grand-dad in the La-Z-Boy, the mother reading on the plane. He said once in a lecture that he believes there are two kinds of poets\u2014those like cats, who slink around corners and seem to need the attention of no one, and those like dogs, always staring up plaintively from the page, ever needful of the love and attention of their readers. It\u2019s a pleasure to be in the gentle but capable hands of a master of the latter camp, as so many of these poems signal us right from the beginning to follow them for a walk out in the surprisingly fresh air. Consider the opening lines of \u201cRiverside, California\u201d:<\/p>\n

I would have to say that the crown<\/em>
\nresting on the head of my first acid trip<\/em>
\nwas the moment I went down on one knee<\/em>
\nbackstage at the Top Hat Lounge<\/em>
\nand proposed marriage to all three Ikettes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Even while cycling through a Florida cemetery, \u201cwheeling past the headstones,\u201d this poet finds ample reason for joy as he imagines the people buried there whose carved names are their only earthly remnants. \u201cI wish I could take you all for a ride,\u201d he says to them, letting us know in his not-so-sly way, he probably means the rest of us too. \u201cRide with me along these halls of the dead,\u201d he says, \u201c . . . as some crows flap in the blue overhead\/ and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collins, like Ted Kooser and Stephen Dunn, captures those private, unhurried moments we so seldom take for ourselves in these technology-drenched, social networked times. In \u201cVocation,\u201d he tells us his job will always have been<\/p>\n

keeping an eye on things<\/em>
\nwhether they existed or not,<\/em>
\nrecumbent under the random stars.<\/em><\/p>\n

In conjuring such a generous world on the page, Collins also creates a kind of comforting order and sense of play, which readers can use to resist the chaos otherwise pressing in around us. His critics will squawk that he\u2019s too accessible, that the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead<\/em> unfurl a bit too neatly and easily. But for this poet, that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horoscopes for the Dead\u00a0 by Billy Collins Random House (2011) $24\u00a0 (hardback) Reviewed by James Crews Billy Collins\u2019 ninth collection of poetry pokes and prods the idea of mortality\u2014the author\u2019s as well as our own\u2014more than in any of his previous books. This one opens with a watchful speaker standing, \u201cbefore the joined grave of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[12,27],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-billy-collins","tag-horoscopes-for-the-dead"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}