I am a casual observer
of Billy Collins’ poetry and recently read three of his books: Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), The Trouble With Poetry (2005) and Nine Horses (2002). I was curious as to
why Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, was so widely read and lauded. I was
interested in particular with his exploration of death which has been
increasingly prevalent in his poetry. I quickly learnt that although Collins
writes frequently about death, his views are often neatly packaged, irreverent
and trite.
His poem ‘Velocity’ got
me thinking about Collins. The speaker is in a club car with his notebook and
realises that “there was nothing to write about/ except life and death.” He
draws “over and over again/ the face of a motorcyclist in profile-
leaning forward, helmetless,
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
TALKING TO THE DEAD
In Billy Collins’
world people don’t seem, to die but remain alive in his imagination and retain
their basic personalities and personal histories. In ‘Grave’ the speaker,
presumably Collins, visits his parent’s dual plot & pressing his ear to the
soft grass he asks them what they think of his new glasses, “They make you look
very scholarly,/ I hear my mother say.” Similarly, in ‘No Time’ Collins sounds his
horn as he speeds past his parent’s cemetery. He imagines quaintly as if they
are still alive, “Then, all day long, I think of him rising up/ to give me that
look/ of knowing disapproval/ While my mother calmly tells him to lie back
down.” In ‘Cemetery Ride’ the speaker pedals through a cemetery and cheerfully
greets many of the dead & hopes for the impossible, “I wish I could take
you all for a ride/ in my wire basket on this glorious April day.”
This tendency to
communicate with the dead in a false & deluded way is furthered in ‘Thank-You
Notes’ in which the speaker personally thanks “everyone who happened to die/ on
the same day I was born”:
Thank you for stepping aside to make room for
me,
for giving up your seat,
getting out of the way, to be blunt
More importantly, in
the wry second person poem, ‘Horoscopes for the Dead’ the speaker ironically
juxtaposes a reading of the daily horoscope with the extinguished dreams of the
dead:
But you will be relieved to learn
that you no longer need to reflect carefully
before acting,
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back
seat
to a business responsibilities that you never
really had
IMAGINING HIS DEATH
Collins tries to
personalise his exploration of death by imagining his own individual demise. His
treatment is characteristically thin. In ‘Rooms’ after three days of “steady,
inconsolable rain, ” the speaker walks through his house and provides the
reader with a running commentary as to which room would be best for him to die
in. The language is detached, detective-like & cheeky in tone:
The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.
And the kitchen has a certain appeal-
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted
kettle.
Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written
letter
Death is viewed as a game, as a series of
rational choices which we can make at our leisure.
In ‘Breathless’ the
speaker contemplates the sleeping positions of people & then he quickly
thinks about the dead and how they will permanently come to rest. In another
transition, the poet recommends how he wishes to be buried:
After a lifetime of watchfulness
and nervous vigilance,
I will be more than ready for sleep
so never mind the dark suit,
the ridiculous tie
and the pale limp hands crossed on the chest.
Lower me down in my slumber,
tucked into myself
like the oldest fetus on earth.
In one of Collins’
more witty poems ‘Statues in the Park’, the speaker examines an equestrian
statue in a public square and he imagines what his own memorial would look
like. The poem ends in a light, playfully humorous note: “And there was I…/
down on my knees, eyes lifted,/ praying to the passing clouds/ forever begging
for just one more day.”
In each of these
poems, Collins is keen to imagine the viewing his dead body. He is confident
and self-assured he will get the sort of death he desires. No pissed pants,
bone-numbing terror or unrelenting shards of pain is in his cards.
This obsession with death is furthered in the
poem ‘Delivery’ in which he finds himself “wishing that the news” of his death
is delivered in the form of a child’s drawing, complete with “puffs of white
smoke/ issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers.”
DEATH AS ART
For the most part, Death is seen as an
intellectual exercise by Billy Collins. He uses the concept to construct poems
which dabble with the idea from a variety of perspectives. In ‘Simple Arithmetic’
the speaker mentions he daily spends time on a small dock gazing pensively into
the lake. Today, he contemplates the whole picture before him and subtracts
five hundred years: “all the houses are gone, the boats. ” Also gone is “the
plane crossing the sky,” the swimming pools, & turning closer home, he
meta-poetically concludes, “and gone are my notebook and my pencil/ and there I
go too,/ erased by my own erasure and blown like shavings off the page.” In
‘Death in New Orleans, a Romance’ the speaker writes another clever meta-poem
in a café over a glass of wine about his mind being “like a wire birdcage” and
how “on the day I die…/ the wire door will spring open/ and the bird takes
flight,/ looping over the ironwork of the city,/ the water tanks and windowed
buildings,/ then up into the clouds and stars.” In ‘Roses’ the speaker is once
again writing into his notebook, this time about how in midsummer the petals of
the flowers grow “cantankerous”, turn brown on the edges and fall to the
ground. He personifies their woeful public death: “then how terrible the
expressions on their faces/ a kind of was
it all really worth it?”
In these poems death is not viewed as an entity
in itself but rather as a vehicle to construct clichéd symbolic images:
erasure, flight and despoiled nature. The poems leave a remote feeling in the
reader, that Collins is smug & is deliberately avoiding the stark,
shrieking ugliness that death brings with it.
ON TRANSCIENCE
Collins is probably more effective at writing about the subtle tweaks
which signal to us on a deeper level that all life will one day end. Yet some
of us never get it. In ‘The Order of the Day’ the speaker is with his family
& as “the sun shot through the branches” after a week of rain, he sees Philip
Larkin-like things whole & true: ‘Everything seemed especially vivid/
because I knew we were all going to die,/ first the cat, then you, then me.”
In ‘House’ he lies down in the bedroom of a house built in 1862 and empathises
with “those who have slept here before” including “the dead farmer and his dead
wife” who he never knew but now provide him with company. In one of Collins’
better poems, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’, the speaker says in a refrain that “soon
enough it will all be over”:
just an expanse of white ink
or a dark tunnel coiling away and down.
No sunflowers, no notebook,
no sand-colored denim jacket
and a piece of straw in the teeth,
just a hole inside a larger hole
and the starless maw of space.
In this bleak recognition of the end
of his consciousness and in everything that has helped shape his identity as a
public poet, the speaker reaches a significant transition & reaffirms his
commitment to the living when tells his lover that “we are still here.” He
coaxes her to remove her top & lie with him:
So undo the buttons on your white
blouse
and toss it over a chair back.
Let us lie down side by side
On these crisp sheets like two
effigies on a tomb.
Similarly, in the second person poem
‘Bereft’ the dead are seen as the “lucky” because of “their freedom from” human
commitments & responsibilities but also there is a sense of loss at the end
of sensation:
no need for doorknobs, snow shovels,
or windows and a field beyond,
no more railway ticket in an inside
pocket.
no more railway, no more tickets, no
more pockets
No more bee chasing you around the
garden
no more you chasing your hat around a
corner,
no bright moon on the glimmering
water,
no cool breast felt beneath an open
robe.
In ‘Memento Mori’ the speaker sees
himself as a mayfly, as “a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.”
Standing “under the bones of a dinosaur” or in a church, he is constantly
reminded of his mortality and realises that no one “has figured out a way to
avoid dying.”
These poems sense effectively
ephemeral nature of our lives and the need for love and acceptance.
OVERVIEW
As you can see from this brief
analysis, Billy Collins writes extensively about death. The poems are clever,
but usually have a feel-good, gimmicky quality about them. You see flashes of the
ephemeral quality of life, but characteristically, Collins shields &
humours his readers from darker visions. The closest he comes is in ‘Reaper’ when
in driving to lunch, he spots a man on the side of the road who returns his
gaze & there is something about his face which gives him a “jolt of fear.”
But he quickly returns us to our comfortable road.
Further
Reading
Extended discussion on
Collins’ poetry- Ernest Hilbert Wages of Fame: The Case of Billy Collins: http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/collins2.htm
Review of Nine Horses:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview11
Billy Collins poems on
Poem Hunter: http://www.poemhunter.com/billy-collins/poems/page-1/?a=a&l=3&y=
