I should have reviewed Billy Collins’s Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn’t stand the excitement.[1] Collins is that rarity among American poets, one with popular appeal, easy to read as a billboard, genial as a Sunday golfer, and not so awful you want to cut your throat after reading him. Many readers complain that poetry is difficult to understand, the way they grumble when an opera is sung in Italian or resent a Czech film with subtitles. Art isn’t supposed to be such hard work, is it? Billy Collins writes poetry for those people, and they appreciate it.

Collins specializes in goofy, slightly offbeat subjects. If you want a poem about mice who play with matches, or about that song repeating uncontrollably in your head, or about feeling sorry for Whistler’s mother, he’s your man. Angst is not a word he’s learned, or Weltschmerz (he may have learned Schadenfreude, but he’s forgotten it). What he loves is the cheesy sentiment of the everyday: “I peered in at the lobsters// lying on the bottom of an illuminated/ tank which was filled to the brim/ with their copious tears.” To the brim! Or worse, if anything could be worse than weeping lobsters, he loves everything—he’s got a heart big as all outdoors:

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.