Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected PoemsSailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience. |
Contents
Student of Clouds | 32 |
The History Teacher | 38 |
from The Art of Drowning 1995 | 45 |
Directions | 51 |
Days | 57 |
On Turning Ten | 63 |
Budapest | 69 |
Piano Lessons | 76 |
Japan | 107 |
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand | 113 |
Taking Off Emily Dickinsons Clothes | 119 |
The Death of the Hat | 126 |
Aristotle | 132 |
DHARMA | 137 |
MADMEN | 144 |
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT | 151 |
Nightclub | 80 |
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July | 87 |
Marginalia | 94 |
Morning | 100 |
THE MOVIES | 158 |
MAN LISTENING TO DISC | 164 |
THE FLIGHT OF THE READER | 171 |
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afternoon arms Art of Drowning barking beautiful Beethoven begin bell BILLY COLLINS bird blue bright Brooklyn Museum chair Cherry Ames clouds cold corner curled dance dark death door earth empty face feel fingers fishing floor garden girl green hand head hear hold Ice Age imagine industrial canal Insomnia lawn leaning leave lift light lines listen look morning mother movie moving never night NINE HORSES Number nurse Osso Buco Paradelle Petrarch piano poem Poet Poetry Questions About Angels rain reading Rival Poet river road Sailing Sensational Nightingales shirt shoulder silence singing skillet sleep slip snow soft stand stanzas staring Susquehanna tall tell thin things tiny tonight trees turn velvet rope walking wall watch wearing weather wind window wings winter woods words write