Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room

Reviewed by Michael Graber

Sailing Alone Around the Room:
New and Selected Poems Billy Collins
Random House
ISBN 0-375-50380-1


In a culture where individuality losses out to mass marketing efforts, it's befitting, even wise, that our Poet Laureate reminds us what it means to be fully human. Billy Collins, in his New and Selected Poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, invents a delightfully rich interior world by being cynical. He speaks with the authority of single point of view, but is more content to spurt out a barbed aside than to wrestle the soul of the nation head-on. Indeed, his sardonic path to the heart will serve us well as he becomes our national ambassador of poetry.

Collins' poems celebrate the panorama of being alive. His humanitarian work is couched in a paradoxical mix of irony and unabashed wonder. Often, his poems begin with a mundane detail that expands into something wholly new, teasing readers into a moment of infinite proportion.

Collins has a rare wit. He uses cunningly simple observations to transform cliched material into a vital force. Whereas many writers have explored and exploited the blues until there are few surprises left, Collins investigates the form with wry detachment, which gives him a fresh perspective on the genre. Here, in the first stanza of The Blues, the poet returns the twelve-bar blues to their original longing:

Much of what is said here
must be said twice,
a reminder that no one
takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.

As a quintessential theme in many of the poems, Collins compresses history into an almost two-dimensional cartoon. His subjective interpretations lampoon the all-too-reverent traditions while displaying a learned, formal knowledge of them. These pieces may rile some stodgy scholars, but make the high points of Western Culture approachable to a general audience. Collins' poker-faced tone never lets the reader be certain if the poet is respectful, mocking, or both. Here, quoted in its entirety as an example, in all its wise-acre glory, is Sonnet:

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen,
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn,
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Although Sonnet hails from the section New Poems, work in Collins first collection sets the foundation of the role of the past in his poetry. In the first stanza of The Lesson, the poet sets the stage for later acts: "In the morning when I found History/snoring heavily on the couch,/I took down his overcoat from the rack/and placed its weight over my shoulder blades."

The combinations of real things, like the history book in the previously quoted stanza, and fanciful conceits about the objects, as in the volume's snoring, create a charged atmosphere. This playful vigor allows Collins to make a high-lyric form of poetry out of plainspoken elements. The charmed nature of the work belies its conversational and prosaic facade. There aren't easy poems, they just seem like it; however, a kernel of transcendence waits in ambush under their breezy surfaces.

It is no accident that the New York Times has hailed Billy Collins "America's Most Popular Poet." While the statement disregards the fact that Jewel, the pop singer, actually sells more than Collins, it points out Collins' position in the eyes of his peers. He embodies the dispossessed grievances of thinking and feeling Americans, shares their cynicism and general malaise enough to try and redeem it with a sideways grin, and gives voice to the decaying bastion of liberal arts. His poetry, then, protests the rampant and deafening pace of contemporary life by its mere existence.

As the art form of poetry becomes more alienated from popular culture, poets are forced to move into the margins of civilization. They become more perceptive, cynical, and imbue their work with a subjective view of humanity that may be the antidote to what critics call The United States of Advertising. Sailing Alone Around the Room reminds us that the small, quiet moments are the most profound. By serving as Poet Laureate and with the release of this volume, Billy Collins moves out of his comfortable position on the sideline of life and into the heart of America. Be thankful.

Michael Graber operates GraberWorks, a strategic communications and writing business in Memphis, Tennessee