The real thing in poetry

Billy Collins is the nation’s current poet laureate and a „wildly successful seller of books (as poets go, anyway),“ notes the poet Mary Jo Salter. „‚Do you know the Billy Collins poem about . . .‘ is the beginning of a question I’ve heard a lot recently,“ she writes, noting that people recall the subjects of Collins’s poems but usually „can’t call up Collins’s exact phrasing,“ partly because he is not known for „complex metrical effects or rhyme schemes. It’s fair to say that you wouldn’t want most poets to disregard so many tools of versification.“ … Salter says Collins is „the real thing in poetry,“ that his poems leave „your mind freshened, robbed of a few complacencies.“

NINE HORSES
Poems.
By Billy Collins.
120 pp. New York: Random House. $21.95

NYT Books 19.10.02:
• Review
• Audio: Billy Collins Reads Selections From ‚Nine Horses‘