Verse chronicle June 2009
You betcha!
On Ballistics by Billy Collins; Selected Poems by Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler; Substrate by Jim A. Powell; The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt; Sonata Mulattica by Rita Dove; and It Is Daylight by Arda Collins.
Billy Collins is funny, everyone agrees. The birds agree, the bees agree, even the fish in the sea agree: Billy Collins is funny. Yet why do I feel, half an hour after closing a Billy Collins book, a sharp grinding in my stomach, as if I’ve eaten some fruit cake past its sell-by date? His wry, self-mocking poems wouldn’t hurt a fly—but they couldn’t kill a fly, either, even if they tried. Readers who have whetted their appetites for drollery on previous books may open Ballistics and be puzzled.[1] Our Norman Rockwell of sly winks, and elbowing good humor, and straw-hatted, flannel-shirted American whimsy is no longer funny. Worse, some of his new poems take place in Paris.
Billy Collins’s method has been to borrow a dry nugget of fact or some mildly absurd observation and see how far he can go. Say you read that the people of Barcelona...
A Message from the Editors
As The New Criterion enters its fifth decade, your support has never been more vital.
Since 1982, The New Criterion has nurtured and safeguarded our delicate cultural inheritance. Join our family of supporters and secure the future of civilization.
