Ballistics: Poems

In an interview in June 2006 for "Guernica Magazine" *, Billy Collins talked about his conscious decision to move from being a serious and difficult to understand poet to one who wrote clear, accessible poems, "I think I kind of bought into the assumption that poetry had to be extremely gloomy and incomprehensible, or nearly so. And when I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

The change came I would say when I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you understand."

OK...I confess: I like his poetry because it is so understandable. A professor of English I once had looked down on poets who were easy to understand and dismissed them as being either lazy or lacking in talent or intellectual light-weights or all three. He'd sometimes say things about a poem written by a poet he didn't particularly care for as being "mellifluous and written with pastels." I'm sure, if he's still teaching, he's saying that to "unsophisticated" undergrads (just like I was back then) about the poetry of Billy Collins. Fortunately, I've grown up and am still unsophisticated enough to enjoy poetry that I can understand and even chuckle at knowing the poet is saying something funny on purpose. Such is the poetry of Billy Collins, for me at least.

I do own most of his poetry books and enjoy many of his poems. The reason I gave BALLISTICS only 4 stars instead of 5 is because I don't think the poems contained within are as good as those in previous books. I do like "Addendum" (p.70), especially the first stanza: "What I forgot to tell you in that last poem/ if you were paying attention at all/ was that I really did love her at the time." It gets my attention right off and then the poem goes on to a remembrance of a love long since over, but still pleasant to recall. On the other side of the poetic coin is a very short poem called "Divorce" (p.98) that is only 18 words (4 lines) total and seems silly to me: "Once, two spoons in bed,/ now tined forks/ across a granite table/ and the knives they have hired." It's got the feeling of something dashed off while sipping coffee at the breakfast table. Here, I think, the poet tries too hard to be cute.

My favorite book of Collins' poems is THE ART OF DROWNING. I like the poem "Philosophy" (pp.69-70) in particular. "I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,/ lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,/ contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman/ might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass." He goes on to write about other philosophers and schools of philosophical thought with tongue firmly imbedded in cheek. There are poems in that volume dealing with such earthbound topics as jazz, food, cigarettes, poetry workshops, reading in a hammock...and every one is comprehensible.

My opinions aside, I do recommend BALLISTICS to Billy Collins fans and to anyone who mistakenly thinks poetry is supposed to be stuffy and just for eggheads or pompous college profs. To those sophisticates out there, I say, open this small 110 page volume of verse and enjoy!

Each of Billy Collins's new books outdoes its predecessor. It's refreshing
to read and understand contemporary poetry in these days of poets attempting to show us how intelligent they are at the expense of their humanity. There is never any of that with Collins's work. Straightforward poems with fresh metaphor and simile are his trademark. After reading any of his collections I am always looking forward to more. One can become addicted to his wit and irony.

Richard Brown

I am one of these people who discovered Billy Collins when I bought his previous poetry collection, "The Trouble With Poetry". I loved that collection so much I re-read it again as soon as I had finished reading it the first time around. Finally, a poet who made sense! I eagerly awaited publication of his new book, but I was very disappointed with "Ballistics". The book isn't bad, so many readers might enjoy it, but Collins comes across as full of himself and his witty remarks fall flat.

The poems in the first two "chapters" of the book are quite ordinary, I felt, after the first signature poem about the reader, which was very good (Collins always starts his collections with such a poem). I was shocked when I realized that the poem "Ballistics", which gives the book its title, describes the author's joy at recognizing, in a photograph, the book of a competitor (a poet he doesn't like) being pierced by a bullet. I felt that type of attitude was unseemly coming from the most popular poet of his generation (and most popular by a landslide on top of that). He is selling many more copies and is a lot better off than his rivals. Does he really need to gloat? Quality picks up at chapter 3, and the good poems you might have read excerpts of in magazines or reviews come from that part of the book (chapter 3 and later): "On the death of a next-door neighbor" and "Baby listening", for instance.

But Collins can't help mention in another poem that he has a girlfriend he is driving to at 7.45am on a weekday because he has decided to sleep with her, and she'll arrive at work "shortly before noon" because of that, but hopefully her boss will like Proust and as a result forgive her. Uh, what? Collins stopped being a teenager a while ago and would do well to remember that little detail.

All in all, there are some good poems but it looks like the poet's success is going to his head. If you really want to buy the book, buy it when it comes out in paperback.

Billy Collins writes poems that are literate, elegant, artfully crafted, and utterly coherent in the point he wants to get across , the feeling he want to evoke, the irony he wants to convey, and his ability to achieve all this in successive books in equally successive poems is both the attraction to his writing and what bores me silly. His new book, "Ballistics", is the writing of someone who wants to take the starch out of the image of poets and the willfully abstruse poems they compose. Rather, he pulls back the curtain and lets you see the process. Often enough he'll set up the scene, paint a picture, and then address the reader directly, aware that he writes verse that will be read by thousands of book buyers, and includes them in on the joke.

This is charming , of course, and one admires the grace with which Collins writes his lines--a better balanced set of free verse I've never seen, really--but for all the pleasure he provides for the painless duration of his poems and the usually flawless what-the-!@@1 surprises he offers up for the final stanza, a formulaic tedium sets in. Disguised as the essence might is, there are trace elements of journalistic efficiency here ; one notes the style, the arranging of details, how the poems start with an announcement of the poet beginning his day futzing around the house, walking into rooms, staring out the window, and then the intruding thought that distracts and manages to make the banal yet telling details of his home life and his community take on a more somber (or alternately, a giddier ) tone, a final, spare description of an item that eludes the metaphorical devices he's deployed, and then the twist, the coda, the pay off that makes you go ahhhh
as though his poems were nothing more than a fast swig from a cold soda. There is so little range to Collins' work that one thinks of a world stuck in one of those Mobius Strips MC Escher was wont to draw compulsively.


Collins writes poems about poetry, especially about the poet in the act of seeing something of the world as if for the first time, certainly as though a veneer had been stripped away and there was Truth Laid Bare, just the essentials of things and activities in themselves with their invisible ironies and vague meloncholies. So much of this is larded with self mystification that Collins, a wise cracker at heart, cannot help but but mock the poet as as lait priest; he gives you the nod and then the wink, and repeats until you get it.


August In Paris

I have stopped here on the rue des écoles
just off the boulevard St-Germain
to look over the shoulder of a man
in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?

Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.

But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.


There is an efficiency of scene setting, tone and delivery of punchline that makes this a close cousin to prose, and there at times that one might mistake Collins, poet, for Dave Barry, humorist. He writes about being in Paris, at the cafe, in such an engaging way that it is possible for the untraveled among his readers to think what he does, or at least what he writes about, is the most natural thing in the world. One would nevermind that Collins scarcely writes about jobs he has had, rarely quotes those he has spoken with, or suspends or restrains the sense of his poised (but proclaiming) persona and concentrates on treating a set of ideas without his usual filter. He's mastered his tools and he cannot seem to go beyond the effects he's learned to create so flawlessly. Their dependability, though, is what makes them unmemorable once their page satisfactions have been had. I nod my head, I turn the page, I forget what I've just read.

It's like driving through an old neighborhood a few too many times; the ambivalence and nostalgic rushes no longer come after familiar buildings are viewed a hundred times too often. With the facile use of the names and pet phrases of Chinese poets, mentions of jazz greats, the sustained gazing upon still objects in and of themselves (doing nothing), the revitalization and one-dimensional ironizing of cliche, we arrive at a poet who has the mark of The Professional, "professional" in the same sense that a newspaper columnist is , a writer who is constantly preparing for the next piece, the race against a set deadline, the marshaling of all notes and ideas in the rush toward a finished set of statements. I remember I used to marvel at how elegant and spontaneously brilliant George Will seemed to be when his columns appeared two or three times a week, but after a while of reading him I recognized the formula he used to sustain his writerly flow. Collins, although not as prolific as Will is required to be, still produces an occasionally splendid poetry that does not challenge the mechanics required to write it at the same level of consistency; monotony is the result.

When I recently heard Billy Collins read several of the poems from this new collection, he was compared, both in the printed material and by the person who introduced him, to Robert Frost in that both writers have the "rare combination of critical acclaim and broad popular appeal," a dubious comparison at best since I can think of six or eight other contemporary poets who would fall into that category as well. I certainly am not suggesting that Mr. Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, is not a fine poet; that he is. He just sounds nothing like Robert Frost nor any other poet for that matter. His poetry does, however, fit Frost's definition of poetry as beginning in delight and ending in wisdom. I was reminded once again that except in the rarest cases that no one reads poetry as well its author and that poetry should always be read aloud.

Mr. Collins writes with charm and humor about the most ordinary of subjects. "This Little Piggy Went to the Market" is all about playing with children. Animals float in bathtubs in "Bathtub Families." And in the poem "Ballistics" for which this volume is named, the poet imagines that in the high-speed photograph of a bullet piercing a book, that the "executed book/was a recent collection of poems written by someone of whom I was not fond."

In addition to these poems that will make you smile, often written with tongue in cheek, many of Mr. Collins' poems would fit his description of poetry as giving form to misery while others fall somewhere in between these two extremes. I would nominate the thoughtful "An Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant" as one of those where Collins is glad that he resisted the temptation as a young poet to write about a lonely old man eating in a restaurant. Now he finds the food delicious, the light "which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches --" and his enjoyment of reading a "book --Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS as it turns out --" and the smiling waitress (the poet says he learned the proper use of the dash from Emily Dickinson).

Mr. Collins can say volumes in few carefully chosen words as in the poem entitled "Divorce."

Once, two spoons in a bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

Then there is the darker poem "A Dog on His Master" where the dog hopes that his master understands that he in all probability will outlive his dog.

Finally my favorite poem of so very many is "On the Death of a Next-door Neighbor" which begins with the following lines:

So much younger and with a tall, young son
in the house above ours on a hill,
it seemed that death had blundered once again.
Was it poor directions, the blurring rain,
or the too-small numbers on the mailbox
that sent his dark car up the wrong winding driveway?

Surely, it was me he was looking for --

If these lines do not put chills on your spine, you have to be like the next-door neighbor. A wondrously beautiful poem.