Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems

Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, the verbal gifts that earned him the title "America's most popular poet" are on full display. The poems here cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union. With simple diction and effortless turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac, as in the opening lines of the title poem:

Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.
Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you...

And in this reflection on his own transience:

It doesn't take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children's party.
Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

Smart, lyrical, and not afraid to be funny, these new poems extend Collins's reputation as a poet who occupies a special place in the consciousness of readers of poetry, including the many he has converted to the genre.

"The 1990s belonged to Billy Collins in the same way that the 1980s belonged to Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten). Collins's gently ironic, gently elegiac work — the mirror image of, say, Jonathan Franzen's suburban delvings — has slowly constructed a pitch-perfect purgatory, and this death-themed ninth collection seems to want to make it as literal as possible: it opens as the speaker stands 'before the joined grave of my parents' and asks, 'What do you think of my new glasses?' In a poem titled 'Hell,' the speaker has 'a feeling that is much worse/ than shopping for a mattress in a mall,/ of greater duration without question,/ and there is no random pitchforking here,/ no licking flames to fear,/ only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.' That this feeling is never quite articulated over the course of 50-odd poems is not to its detriment: despite the prosaic settings and everyday language, Collins is after the big questions: of life, death, and how to live. But the world is not of his making, and his is a temperament oddly suited to a world where 'the correct answer' to questions like why the stars appear as they do, strike 'not like a bolt of lightning/ but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.' (Mar.) Anne Hutchinson, Sen, Katherine Harris, and a catalogue of the poisonous plants of America all find their way into this fifth book from Willis (Meteoric Flowers). Willis's fascination with forms originating outside of poetry — 'F.A.Q,' 'Flow Chart,' 'Blacklist' — makes for a collection of great variety, with poems of various shapes, sizes and lengths. Some of the poems lose momentum in wordplay, but elsewhere Willis is her sharpest, funniest, and most original when she calls up a subject almost as old as poetry itself: witches. 'The Witch' and 'Blacklist' find Willis freeing herself to single, aphoristic lines that manage to comment on the heritage of woman-as-witch ('If her husband dies unexpectedly, she may refuse to marry his brother') while sending up our modern landscape as well ('In Hollywood the sky is made of tin'). Willis's address is unmistakable: these are poems that 'tell you what you've done.' (Mar.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

"Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new." The Christian Science Monitor

"The most companionable of poetic companions." The New York Times

"A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace." The New Yorker

"It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment." The New York Review of Books

Billy Collins is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. A distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and a distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.