Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.
“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal
Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he sells out reading venues all across the country. Appearing regularly in The Best American Poetry series, his poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins’s poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder.
In the poet’s own words, he hopes that his poems “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this “poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace” (The New Yorker).
“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal
Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he sells out reading venues all across the country. Appearing regularly in The Best American Poetry series, his poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins’s poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder.
In the poet’s own words, he hopes that his poems “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this “poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace” (The New Yorker).
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Community Reviews
The only poetry I can stomach! But I have to imagine Billy Collins' voice reading to me when I read his poems...
If I imagined I didn't know who Collins was, I'd probably easily dismiss this collection. I admit I might be missing something crucial, but most of these poems seemed just okay to me. My favorite (perhaps a strange choice) was "Greek and Roman Statuary" which seemed to contain some depths. But at its worse, "What She Said" made me angry that I was perhaps wasting my time on this. There's a suggestion in some of these poems that Collins doesn't deeply love or see the subjects of some of his poems because he's too busy admiring his own humor or cleverness.
Reviewing poetry is really awkward for me.
(This is me - clearly in deer form - reviewing poetry.)
I really don't know what I'm reading half the time. I just know if I like it or if I don't like it. I actually don't know if my laughs or my tears are warranted or not when they escape. For this reason I am not going to even attempt to analyze any of the poems or really "review" the collection at all.
This is a relatively large collection and much more than I should have taken on. I spaced reading it over a couple of months and tried to read less than a dozen poems at a time, but I still found myself wanting to skim toward the end because most were starting to sound the same.
This collection as a whole was probably more of a 3.5, but I'm rounding to 4 Stars because of the handful that really knocked it out of the park for me. My favorites: The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska, Memento Mori, The Lanyard (a previous favorite that I loved just as much reading it a tenth? thirteenth? time), Building with Its Face Blown Off, Tension, and Hell.
(This is me - clearly in deer form - reviewing poetry.)
I really don't know what I'm reading half the time. I just know if I like it or if I don't like it. I actually don't know if my laughs or my tears are warranted or not when they escape. For this reason I am not going to even attempt to analyze any of the poems or really "review" the collection at all.
This is a relatively large collection and much more than I should have taken on. I spaced reading it over a couple of months and tried to read less than a dozen poems at a time, but I still found myself wanting to skim toward the end because most were starting to sound the same.
This collection as a whole was probably more of a 3.5, but I'm rounding to 4 Stars because of the handful that really knocked it out of the park for me. My favorites: The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska, Memento Mori, The Lanyard (a previous favorite that I loved just as much reading it a tenth? thirteenth? time), Building with Its Face Blown Off, Tension, and Hell.
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