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This is the first publication outside the US by the New York poet Billy Collins, and selects work from four of his previous collections. It comes on the back of a lot of hype Stateside, at least for poetry, with Collins appearing last year in a front page article by Bruce Weber of the New York Times. Picador duly reproduce the now famous quote in their blurb, “the most popular poet in America”. Yet there are better qualities to the man and his work with which to introduce him.

First and foremost, Billy Collins is a relaxed poet. Don’t get me wrong - he is also anxious, restless in where his poems take you, and always keen to see things in a refreshing light, rather than in the received idiom. But somehow he is and does all this while maintaining an ease of stance, an even tone of meditation. It’s O’Hara without the blather and fidgety naming, Whitman without the declamation. Or further down the line, it’s Wordsworth moved several centuries and an ocean on. And without the whole Man vs. Nature thing - as Collins says in the wonderful Marginalia:

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

Collins is also relaxed in form, his free verse by and large following a very loose pentameter line. He happily sails past the schisms of US poetry, the Scylla and Charybdis of Language poetry and New Formalism. And if Collins is “the most popular poet in America”, then it’s easy to understand why. Of all the good poets you read this year, Collins is likely to be the most accessible.

The first poem by Billy Collins that I ever encountered remains the one that best demonstrates his virtues. It is the title poem of his collection Questions About Angels:

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

Collins wears his learning lightly, to invoke the cliché. Many of his poems revolve around such revived propositions, those entries from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that inhabit the grey area between trivia and the genuinely esoteric. They are then explored in a whimsical manner, as here, when the poem then follows what alternatives might be put - “What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their clothes, their diet of unfiltered light?” - before returning to that theological illustration of infinity:

               …but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

At once lyrical and humorous, with a light play of irony, Collins can come across as a kind of post-modern Heinrich Heine. The poems in Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes often visit Europe as the Old World, with Plight of the Troubadour and Paradelle for Susan, for example, inspired in different ways by langue d’oc poetry. The Death of Allegory imagines what has happened to all those personified Vices and Virtues from mediaeval Romance. This contains a poetry in-joke for those of you who know your American poets: “They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. / Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.”

Many feature enough dark woods and towering clouds to prepare us for Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey. In that particular poem, Collins reduces the Romantic sensibility to “I’m not feeling as chipper as I did back then”. Heine would definitely have approved, as also of an amusing exposition of jalousie de métier in The Rival Poet.

From a technical point of view, Collins really is a master of endings. Take the closure of Questions About Angels or this from On Turning Ten:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life
I skin my knees. I bleed.

I won’t spoil the marvellous final image of Momento Mori or the audaciously turned Sweet Talk. More often Collins winds down his poems on a sweetly familiar lyrical note and somehow manages to repeat the trick over and over again.

If there is a problem with these poems, it comes from the very virtues that make Collins such a ‘rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence’ in Mike Donaghy’s words. There are many poems which, while customarily brilliant in their observation and whimsical lyricism, remain hard to imagine being read more than twice. The Many Faces of Jazz and Embrace are among the better examples of this, and they are truly worth two readings. But others, such as The Lesson or Man in Space work more like jokes than actual poems, and there are longer poems which are really just elongated one-liners.

Collins is often surreal, and clearly influenced by his compatriot Charles Simic, but where Simic can be genuinely weird, Collins rarely creates the kind of obliqueness that can withstand many readings. More importantly perhaps, the conversational diction Collins employs can in itself make the poems run a little bit too easily. His best work peppers his musings with startling images and the occasional choice word, but his language doesn’t have the texture or fractious music of August Kleinzahler, say, which would give the work that extra depth.

You can’t have it all ways, however, and Collins has chosen his style for the right reasons. He is a truly humane writer, and one can’t help feeling that his figure of The History Teacher is to some extent a self-portrait. The History Teacher tells his students that “the Ice Age was really lust the Chilly Age”, while Spanish Inquisition involved an outbreak of questions such as “How far is it from here to Madrid?” In another one of those quietly brilliant endings, Collins has his teacher gather up his notes, walking home:

…past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

Nodding off is one thing I can guarantee you won’t be doing if you read this man’s work. Go buy, reader.