4.0
Nine Horses
ByPublisher Description
Nine Horses, Billy Collins’s first book of new poems since Picnic, Lightning in 1998, is the latest curve in the phenomenal trajectory of this poet’s career. Already in his forties when he debuted with a full-length book, The Apple That Astonished Paris, Collins has become the first poet since Robert Frost to combine high critical acclaim with broad popular appeal. And, as if to crown this success, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001–2002, and reappointed for 2002–2003.
What accounts for this remarkable achievement is the poems themselves, quiet meditations grounded in everyday life that ascend effortlessly into eye-opening imaginative realms. These new poems, in which Collins continues his delicate negotiations between the clear and the mysterious, the comic and the elegiac, are sure to sustain and increase his audience of avid readers.
What accounts for this remarkable achievement is the poems themselves, quiet meditations grounded in everyday life that ascend effortlessly into eye-opening imaginative realms. These new poems, in which Collins continues his delicate negotiations between the clear and the mysterious, the comic and the elegiac, are sure to sustain and increase his audience of avid readers.
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4.0
Created 6 months ago
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“I am not very knowledgeable about poetry - I tried to read this book slowly, not rushing and clattering the poems along. I liked the first two poems that folded one into the book- The Country I found charming. I was surprised, my favorite poem was the Great Walter Pater. I think some of the poems gave one pieces of things to think about. This was a quiet collection. At times - gentle. At times - not boring or unimportant just speaking to someone else, someone in the next room or down a row of houses. I appreciated his restrained use of language but found these poems touched my mind, little harrumph moments, or oh what a nice turn of phrase, rather than speaking to my heart. More like looking at pictures than listening to music. Some turns of thought, inside these stanzas, I found frustrating and somehow though I love boats - I found them funny, simple figures in these poems. More like a toy you’d toss into the bathtub than the real thing. This was a sedate sort of collection. It did talk about small moments in life which is always important - I just feel that I will remain respectful acquaintances with these poems, rather than friends, confidants or intellectual rivals. We didn’t have the best of chemistry.”
Dorothy Money
Created 7 months agoShare
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Kiki Adams
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Bree Hatfield
Created 9 months agoShare
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“In this collection, Billy Collins weaves aspects of mundane life with a sort of divinity. In “‘More Than a Woman’”, he compares a song stuck in his head to “the music of the spheres, / the sound no one ever hears / because it has been playing forever,” and goes on to say that “the spheres are colored pool balls, / and the music is oozing from a jukebox / whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.” Collins is extrapolating a mundane phenomenon and using it as a metaphor for the supernatural, tying the two together to give the reader a sense that there is magic in the mundane.
He does this in many other poems as well. He compares his drawings of speed lines on a motorcycle to the rush of time and the concept of eternity in “Velocity”; he contemplates death and the memory of a dead groundhog on the road to a ghost in “Ave Atque Vale”; he compares the sounds of everyday life to music and memory in “Air Piano”; and other times, he’s playful with the supernatural imagery, like in “Absence” where he imagines a lost chest piece come to life.
In Part Two and Three of the book, he takes this theme one step further. In the poems “As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse” and “Nine Horses”, he compares mundane things to the divine. In the former, he compares his impromptu diorama to the universe with himself as god; in the latter, he compares the photograph of the nine horses to an idol of god watching over everything. This gives the reader the sense that the world is divine by itself, and that if there are gods it’s the artists, the photographer, the ordinary person with a wild imagination. And on a more somber note, he compares the act of writing to the toils of the dead in “Writing in the Afterlife”, giving us a slightly darker angle to the divine nature of the book.
In Part Four, he brings the supernatural tone crashing to earth with poems of mortality, life, and death in a finale that feels justified and cautiously joyous.”
About Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, 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, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.
Other books by Billy Collins
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