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So the U.S.A. has a 'Poet Laureate' and Billy Collins, of all people, has been chosen to hold that title for one year.  An office designed to flatter a monarchy, for the annual guerdon of a butt of Canary wine, seems as oddly attuned to the "land of the free and the land of the brave" as to the laid-back attitude of this particular poet.

However the Americans have their own manner of handling these things.  I have seen a report that Laura Bush sought consolation in Collins's poems after the events of September 11th, her favourite being Passengers, written before that ominous date, yet contemplating with a degree of topicality the prospect of the author's death on a plane.  The First Lady has chosen well, for Passengers is as good a showcase as most for Collins's powers of description, one mocking eye trained on his own emotions, the other on the expectations of his public:

Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.

Gautam Naik's appreciation of Billy Collins (Magma 14, Spring 1999) mapped out very well his strengths and limitations, "his carefully crafted voice, at once kooky and serious", but his charm with an occasional tendency to become repetitive.  It was later that Picador published his selected poems as a UK paperback under the title of Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes.  Andrew Neilson's review (Magma 18, Autumn 2000) drove me in a buying-frenzy to my local Waterstone's.  An American male who could hold that great feminist icon up to affectionate mockery, as Billy does in the title poem, could not be all bad.  Collins proved to be good at "the complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth century America" as he sailed "like a polar explorer...towards the iceberg" of Emily Dickinson's nakedness.  The interest of this and many of Collins's other poems lies in its casual progression to a conclusion that seems unexpected even to its author.

His originality lies more in what he says than in any novelty of technique.  His lines never end in rhyme, and only begin with a capital letter when one is needed to point the start of a new sentence; still, he spares us the ee cummings treatment.  I've not caught him counting syllables or stresses, yet each poem can be spoken with ease and obeys some unobvious system of construction baggy enough to contain its wayward author's meaning.  Andrew Neilson wrote of "his free verse by and large following a loose pentameter line."  Collins does once attempt a paradelle, a verse-form of absurd complexity devised for 12th century langue d'oc love poetry and later wisely abandoned in favour of that more expressive medium, the crossword puzzle.  Not surprisingly he fails to crank this rusty vehicle into life, yet it is reassuring that he tried.  Persistent informality can too easily slide into limp facility.

There is something of the academic dandy about Collins, who is a professor of English at the City University of New York's Lehman College, and a visiting writer at a few other places. By a tour de force one of his poems, Workshop, gives us, in the very act of its composition, a tutorial in creative writing.  In the second stanza it comments:

And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem....

In the third stanza it begins to express self-doubt:

But what I'm not sure about is the voice
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe-smoke in my face.
But maybe that's just what it wants to do.

Particularly characteristic of Collins's 'voice' is his manner of looking at himself from the outside and sharing with us the absurdity of what he sees.  I like especially his Purity in which he imagines himself closing the door of his study:

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
Uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

None the less, in removing his organs one by one he is often tempted, so he tells us, to leave his penis on, which must be nice for him as well as lucky for us, for without it he could scarcely have entertained us with The Rival Poet.  In that poem he indulges in a daydream of revenge, standing at the head of a marble stair:

high above the crowded ballroom.
A retainer in livery announces me
and the Contessa Maria Isabella
Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.

You are the one far below
fidgeting in your rented tux
with some local Cindy hanging all over you.

"Multalire"?  It looks as if our poet thinks "multalire" means many liras, when in fact "una multa" is a fine.  In such company the rival poet is surely well advised to stick with the local Cindies.  Besides, since he wrote those lines the tables have been turned and Collins has himself become one of the best-known poets in the U.S.A..  Perhaps I was wrong, just now, to doubt his suitability to be Poet Laureate over there.  A sense of absurdity, his own and ours, may prove just the tonic the United States needs in the year when its topless towers have been burnt.  I hope he will not now feel constrained by his laureateship to give dull and dignified expression to public grief.