Billy Collins is one of America’s most loved poets. He was the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003.  When Random House lured Collins away from the University of Pittsburgh Press, they gave him a six-figure advance on a three-book deal.  That doesn’t really happen to poets in America.  The poetry section of your local bookstore is sure to have a generous selection of his work.

For most of the time that I’ve taken an interest in poetry, Billy Collins has been reliable.  Many of his poems have a technique, kind of like the movie The Sixth Sense, where he feeds you a piece of information in the last stanza that changes everything that came before it.  So you go back and reread the poem with the light of this new meaning.  It’s a really good effect and the wife and I never tire of it.  When I’ve needed to find a gift for a birthday or the holidays, reliable Billy Collins has always delivered the goods.

Until now.  Whether it’s celebrity or all of that Random House lucre or just getting old, Collins has started to swing and miss.  The wife and I are presently working our way through Collins’ 2016 chapbook, The Rain in Portugal.  Far too often we arrive at that last stanza and look at each other . . . and shrug.  Often the poem would be better if he had ended it a stanza or two earlier.

The title of this post is taken from Collins’ poem “Species” which is one of his dog poems.  This poem has its pleasures.  The description of “a terrier on a leash/ trotting briskly along as if running/ his weekday morning errands” or “the young spaniel,/ tied to a bench in the shade,/ who was now wagging/ not only his tail but the whole of himself.”  These are recognizable, much-loved images, but there’s nothing that makes you see anything better or more clearly than you did before.

I don’t really have good words to describe pedestrian poetry, but most of this book is pretty . . . meh.

Mr. Collins’ poem “Cosmology” is a good example.  You can read it here:

https://iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,2363672,2363672,quote=1

It pictures the world, not as resting on the back of an elephant standing on the back of a sea turtle, standing on the back of sea turtle, ad infinitum, but as resting on the head of Keith Richards, who stands on the other Rolling Stones, who stands on Muddy Waters.  It sounds like the beginnings of a joke, but it never really lands.  Nor is there any moment when you get that poetic “click” and everything snaps into focus.

Not for me anyway.  Nor for the wife.  Apparently “Cosmology” did click for the poetry editor of The New Yorker; however.  The New Yorker ran it on September 5, 2016.  So what do I know?  Probably not as much as the poetry editor at The New Yorker.

This poem was not published in The New Yorker, but it shows Collins at the height of his powers examining one of our deepest and darkest fears, that perhaps our dogs secretly don’t like us.  Here’s a video of Collins reading “The Revenant”:

When he’s good, Billy Collins is very, very good.