Sailing alone around the room : new and selected poems / Billy Collins

From The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988)--Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House--Walking Across the Atlantic--Plight of the Troubadour--The Lesson--Winter Syntax--Advice to Writers--The Rival Poet--Insomnia--Earthling--Books--Bar Time--My Number--Introduction to Poetry--The Brooklyn Museum of Art--Schoolsville. From Questions About Angels (1991)--American Sonnet-- Questions About Angels--A History of Weather--The Death of Allegory--Forgetfulness--Candle Hat--Student of Clouds-- The Dead--The Man in the Moon--The Wires of the Night--Vade Mecum--Not Touching--The History Teacher--First Reader--Purity--Nostalgia. From The Art of Drowning (1995)--Consolation--Osso Buco--Directions--Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales--The Best Cigarette--Days--Tuesday, June 4, 1991-- Canada-- On Turning Ten--Workshop--My Heart--Budapest--Dancing Toward Bethlehem--Monday Morning-- Center--Design--Pinup--Piano Lessons--The Blues--Man in Space--Nightclub-- Some Final Words. From Picnic, Lightning (1998)-- Fishing on the Susquehanna in July--To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now-- I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"--Afternoon with Irish Cows--Marginalia--Some Days-- Picnic, Lightning--Morning--Bonsai--Shoveling Snow with Buddha--Snow--Japan--Victoria's Secret--Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey--Paradelle for Susan--Lines Lost Among Trees--Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes--The Night House--Splitting Wood--The Death of the Hat--Passengers--Where I Live--Aristotle. New Poems--Dharma--Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles--Snow Day--Insomnia--Madmen--Sonnet--Idiomatic--The Waitress--The Butterfly Effect--Serenade--The Three Wishes-- Pavilion--The Movies--Jealousy--Tomes--Man Listening to Disc--Scotland--November--The Iron Bridge--The Flight of the Reader

"High, most encouraging tidings"--that is how Billy Collins, the widely read and widely acclaimed poet, describes the music in his poem about the gospel singing group The Sensational Nightingales. The same phrase applies, just as joyfully, to the arrival ofSailing Alone Around the Room, a landmark collection of new and selected poems by this Guggenheim Fellow, NPR contributor, New York Public Library "Literary Lion," and incomparably popular performer of his own good works. From four earlier collections, which have secured for him a national reputation, Collins offers the lyric equivalent of an album of Greatest Hits. In "Forgetful-ness," memories of the contents of a novel "retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones." In "Osso Buco," a poem about gustatory pleasure, the "lion of content-ment" places a warm heavy paw on the poet's chest. In "Marginalia," he catalogs the scrawled comments of books' previous readers: " 'Absolutely,' they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. 'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man!' " And he also serves us a generous portion of new poems, including "Man Listening to Disc," a jazz trip with headphones, and "The Iron Bridge," a wildly speculative, moving elegy. Whether old or new, these poems will catch their readers by exhilarating surprise. They may begin with irony and end in lyric transcendence. They may open with humor and close with grief. They may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end with infinity. Wise, funny, sad, stealthy, and always perfectly clear, these poems will not be departing for that little fishing village with no phones for a long, long time. Billy Collins, possessed of a unique lyric voice, is one of American poetry's most sensational nightingales.