The much-loved American author’s inventive collection is intelligent, accessible – perhaps a little too cosy at times
Dubbed the “most popular poet in America” by the New York Times, Billy Collins has won countless admirers for his chatty, witty, wholly dependable poetry. At pains to welcome the reader with avuncular charm, he writes lines that are more serious than they seem, though by how much, you’d be hard pressed to say. Wry and self-mocking, his favoured territory is the suburban everyday – a pop song stuck in your head; people-watching on public transport; a “perfect” spring day – though he is most at home striking a knowing and self-referential pose, “looking every inch the writer / right down to the little writer’s frown on my face”. “If This Were a Job I’d Be Fired”, quips the title of one poem, its narrator swanning off, having penned the most inconsequential of verses. Philip Larkin would have surely labelled him the “shit in the shuttered chateau”. But while some critics have called Collins a philistine, there is a productive quirkiness to his poems, finding surprise and profundity in unpicking objects, phrases and peculiar factoids. As a poet who is especially reader conscious, his writing is both unusual and praiseworthy for attempting to balance accessibility with intelligence, “picking up the phone / to imagine your unimaginable number”.
Aimless Love follows on from Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) as the second selection of Collins’s poems for a UK audience. It draws on his four collections published since then, alongside 50 new poems. “Aimless Love” is as trademark a Collins poem as any, typifying what you may find to admire or dislike in his work, depending on your taste. It finds our poet wandering about, falling for just about every creature that meets his happy gaze, whether “a wren”, “a mouse / the cat had dropped under the dining room table”, or even a bar of “patient and soluble” soap. Some will gag at this kind of whimsical fancy, but it’s worth noting that Collins is rarely committed to a poem’s initial stance; the concept is the occasion to get things going. In this case, it turns out to be a reflection on love, imagining how it might exist “without recompense, without gifts, / or silence on the telephone”. “But my heart is always propped up / in a field on its tripod”, the speaker laments, “ready for the next arrow”. Though we calculate between its revivifying promise and its emotional cost, the poem suggests, most of us are victims to love’s unpredictable strangeness.
Billy Collins remains to middle America what John Betjeman was to postwar England: popular, nostalgic, gently comic.
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