"I think of the novelist as a houseguest. The poet is more someone who just appears. You know, a door opens, and there's the poet! He says something about life or death, closes the door and is gone. Who was that masked man?" - Billy Collins
I've had a hard time deciding when to tell you that this is a review of a poetry collection. Should I slip this fact into the middle after I've given you a great story about the poet, like a parent hiding dreaded medicine in a spoonful of ice cream? Or should I be bold and say, "Here, read this! It will be good for you - just like that pile of broccoli you're contemplating?"
But Billy Collins isn't that kind of poet. He's not broccoli or dreaded medicine. In fact, in "Litany," he will tell you he is "the sound of rain on the roof ... the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table." Comfortable. Familiar.
Reading "Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins is like sitting down for a conversation with an old friend.
And that is the art of Collins' poetry. There are few who speak with such beauty and honesty about what it means to be mortal - not just the death part but also the humor and vulnerability "as we rush along the road of the world."
Collins' poems at once make us laugh and seconds later make us sigh in recognition. "The Revenant" gives us a dog who says in heaven the dogs write in poetry, "the cats and all others in prose." Or the poem where Collins contemplates that he is the same age as Cheerios - well, actually a few months older than Cheerios: "Why that dude's older than Cheerios/the way they used to say/Why that's as old as the hills." But, turn the page and halfway down a poem called "Digging" a phrase pivots us from contemplating the detritus of a past century - old bottles, knobs, a once-blue toy car - to a tiny grave made for the family cat: "I still have to widen the hole/and deepen it for her by at least another foot/but not before I stop for a moment/with the once-blue car idling in my palm/to imagine the boy who grew up here/and to see that two of the crusted wheels still spin."
Who doesn't love a friend who, by turns, makes you laugh and sigh and perhaps feel smarter than you thought you were? This volume of Collins' carefully crafted short poems is the perfect companion. "Aimless Love" is a book you will want to slip into your bag or pocket and savor one conversation at a time.
Paula Schulte is the marketing coordinator for Missouri River Regional Library.