Poetry Review: WATER, WATER: POEMS

Count me a Billy Collins fan. He is one of only a handful of poets I've heard read his own poetry in person and the only one I paid money to see. Water, Water is the eighth book of his poetry I've read, making Collins right up there with Mary Oliver as my most-read poets, and this may be my favorite collection of his so far.

What is it I like so much about Collins' poems? Well, for one thing many of them are funny and most of them are relatable. For example, in the poem "Cardinal" the poet is soaking in the swimming pool when a Vatican-red cardinal lands just a few feet away, at his eye level. A rustling in the tree nearby reveals the cardinal's less-colored mate. The poet, at that moment decides to keep this moment to himself. He won't share it with his wife. He will take this memory to his grave alone. But minutes later, his wife arrives outside with coffee and they talk about ordinary things. She tells him her plans and he tells her about the cardinals -- "making sure not to leave anythings out -- / including my idea about keeping it a secret / and that really dumb thing about the grave." This poem makes me smile to even think of it. It is so typical in a marriage to share mundane things with one's spouse. "Little things don't mean much / until I report back from the front." I realized after reading "Cardinal" this is what my husband and I both do with our adult daughter, too. She is single and our house is between her home and and her job, so she often drops by our house for a meal or to play games with us. We find we tell her all the little details of our lives, even "that really dumb thing about the grave." 

Collins, who is in his mid 80s right now, wrote several poems about his high school experiences and about the music he enjoyed then and now. The first line of the poem "Days of Teenage Glory" had me laughing out loud -- "When I was busy committing the crime of high school, / the songs on the radio / took about two minutes to play..." I've been thinking a lot about high school these days since this is the summer of both Don's and my 50-year high school class reunions. And thinking back to high school days does make one think back to all the horrible decisions one made as a teenager and how irrelevant much of what we were taught was. There is much I can relate to in his poems.

Collins does not only write funny poems, he has a great sense of humor about himself. For example in his poem "Autobiography" he talks about starting a project to write about his life but abandons it by lunch time -- "Plus I already could hear / the voices of the vicious reviewers / happy to dwell on my shortcomings -- // my love of personification / (my melancholic tricycle, for instance), ... / And they would be right / about the pages and pages of senseless dialogue, / not to mention the tedium of chronological order, / even though that seems to be the way / my life has chosen to unfold itself, at least so far." Oddly my life has unfolded chronologically, too. We have so much in common.😏

Let me recommend this collection to you. See if you, too, can find some poems which speak straight to your experiences!

-Anne