Picnic, Lightning (Pitt Poetry Series) -... I adore poetry, and am a long-time reader of verse, but I guess I simply do not understand the national love for Billy Collins. Emperor, clothes.

This was, I think, my first encounter with Billy Collins's poetry. I've been aware of him for years, and sometimes remember to look for his books when I'm browsing bookstores or the library, but it took until now to actually find one.

I liked this collection, overall, but it didn't blow me away. I'm not sure if it's the way he writes or if it was just the specific poems in this collection, but I'm curious and will definitely be looking a bit harder for more of his work in the future.

Picked up this collection (Picnic, Lightning - Billy Collins) at the local library semi-annual book sale.  It was day 3 of the sale, with paperbacks down to 50 cents, so I was surprised to come across this find.  The local university (UNCW) has a pretty good writing program, so I figured all the good books would be gone -- scooped up by undergrads looking to impress, or grad students, looking for inspiration.  But Billy Collins remained, much to my delight.  This is an old University of Pittsburgh Press edition (1998), so maybe anyone who wants it already has it, except me and the person who gave it up, though I now have it, too, feeling much the more richer than my benefactor, yet I hope Collins' words remain with my new kin whose volume now belongs to me.  

 

I started in as soon as I got home, jacket on the floor, and found that Collins never fails to deliver (I suspected, and expected as much, which is why I was so delighted at the find). As I read these poems, I feel more than a bit like the subject of the introductory verse, "A Portrait of the Reader with a bowl of Cereal," my "spoon dripping milk, ready to listen." Lead on, Mr. Collins, lead on.  I'm all ears. 

I received a promotional copy through the First Reads program. So a tip of the hat to Alaina Waagner and the Random House Marketing team.

I rate it a soft 4.

It's a lot of poetry: 247 pages of it, even after excluding the gap pages between sections. There are four sections of selected poems, ranging in publication date from 2002 to 2011. The section of new poems is saved for last, as it should be.

Collins writes a lot about nature, animals, and such. This isn't exactly my thing, but I give him credit for doing it well. However, it gets a bit redundant after a while. One thing I noticed, when looking at my list of stand-out poems, was how many referenced writing. Eleven of my original list of seventeen did. It's not that so many of the poems in the collection are about writing; it's that when he writes about writing, it's clear he has a talent for it.

Anyway, I narrowed my list of seventeen stand-out pieces to ten, six of which fall into the 'about writing' category:

"Reader" - It doesn't even get a real page number, but it's an excellent piece.
"Poetry" - From Nine Horses.
"January In Paris" - From Ballistics.
"Scenes of Hell" - From Ballistics.
"Divorce" - Four lines, because he didn't need any more. From Ballistics.
"Drawing You from Memory" - From Horoscopes For the Dead.
"Drinking Alone" - A new poem.
"Villanelle" - New poem.
"If This Were a Job I'd Be Fired" - New poem.
"The Names" - A new poem dedicated to "the victims of September 11th and their survivors".

Note: I sent Ms. Waagner a query about one of the poems and am waiting for her response. It's a bit too early to expect one yet though.

Anyway, I leave you with this:

And I am getting good at being blank, / staring at all the zeroes in the air. - "Returning the Pencil to Its Tray" (Horoscopes For the Dead)

Update (12/15): It looks like I won't be getting a response to my query. Oh well.

As always, I enjoy this man's poetry. Wry observations and surprising analogies. That said, this book wasn't as satisfying as some of his others. In any poetry collection, there are some poems that work for me and some that don't. I found many more that didn't in this one.

I enjoyed this one:

Table Talk

Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie--
asked if anyone had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom
of St. Sebastian.

The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,
then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by arrows:
the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.
Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died
of a heart attack.

I think I'll have the trout, I told the waiter,
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian,
a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to a post with rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,
and after we ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things
do arrive,

where people usually get where they are going--
where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash on the surface of the pond,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your
arms--

and yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,
splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,

that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling
with quills.


This one didn't appeal to me. Like many of the poems, it didn't seem to have much to say. I liked the description of the child's drawing, but connecting that to the idea of death news being delivered by truck failed for me.

Delivery

Moon in the upper window,
shadow of my cooked pen on the page,
and I find myself wishing that the news of my death

might be delivered not by a dark truck
but by a child's attempt to draw that truck--
the long rectangular box of the trailer,

some lettering on the side,
then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,
maybe the inscrutable profile of the driver,

and puffs of white smoke
issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers
and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky,
only smaller.