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“Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.”—Billy Collins
You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.”
Now “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.
3:00 AM
Only my hand
is asleep,
but it’s a start.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 15, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780399589799
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780399589799
- File size: 1831 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 1, 2022
Amiable and gregarious, much-loved former U.S. Poet Laureate Collins takes a new tact in his latest collection, writing 125 short poems of a few lines each as he explores nature, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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November 1, 2022
"I loved the suddenness of small poems," Collins writes, musing on his long fascination with this form which, unlike haiku, has no rules except the required brevity, preferably of the breathtaking kind. A former U.S. poet laureate whose collections, 12 in number, attain best-seller status, Collins excels in concision, bringing distilled levity, absurdity, tenderness, imagination, longing, ruefulness, and metaphysics to more than 125 short lyrics. Nature, love, curious juxtapositions, observations, questions, riffs, puns, and marveling are all at play in these funny, clever, poignant poems that range in setting and focus while sharing mischief and delight, irony and loss, contemplation and wisdom. Here, an entire lifetime of feelings, dreams, anguish, and improvisation is compressed into a half-dozen lines or less. The table of contents is the longest composition. Though quickly read, Collins' small but fully loaded poems ask to be reread; there's always more to discern. Here's the smallest of these small but potent poems (the titles are always crucial), "The Sociologist: " "I wandered lonely as a crowd." A ""small"" review would say: Not to be missed.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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