Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Billy Collins is one of those American poets who seems to write so easily and effortlessly that I imagine him knocking out poems without too much fuss. When he produces a poem with the title, ‘I Chop some Parsley while listening to Art Blakey’s version of ‘Three Blind Mice’’, it strikes me that he was probably also actually writing the poem at the same time. And drinking a glass of wine, smiling at his wife, and what else?

     In saying that I’m not suggesting that the poems lack care. As I said, he ‘seems’ to write without too much effort, but of course he’s a craftsman, works to get things right, and gives the impression that it’s easy. In the same way, the poems suggest that writing them is just a part of his life, like chopping parsley. But lines like the following don’t come without a lot of practice:

My teacher lies on the floor with a bad back
off to the side of the piano.
I sit up straight on the stool.
He begins by telling me that every key
is like a different room
and I am a blind man who must learn
to walk through all twelve of them
without hitting the furniture.
I feel myself reach for the first doorknob.

     This technique is fairly consistent throughout the poems, as is the voice, but the content, what the poems say, varies widely. And Collins has a vivid imagination, leaping in and out of time and place and opening our eyes to things we know but often don’t take seriously. He also knows how to suggest in a way that prods at the imagination and reminds us of the moods and feelings that affect us all:

As usual, I was thinking about the
                                       moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a
                                                            stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future,
                                                        that place
where people are doing a dance
                                          we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

     The jacket of this book says that Collins is “the most popular poet in America”, though this is his first UK collection. It will be interesting to see how British readers respond to him. I suspect that some of them will see his fluid, witty, and conversational style as not matching up to their ideas of how real poetry is written. But they will be wrong, and if anyone wants convincing about how powerful Collins can be then I suggest they read ‘Tuesday, June 4, 1991’, where the ordinary takes on the values of the amazing and the poem rides to a glorious climax