Name: Horoscopes for the Dead
Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781400064922

Billy Collins

A latest volume of 50 poetic works by the former U.S. Poet Laureate includes poignant and lighthearted pieces on intimate topics ranging from love and death to solitude and aging. 50,000 first printing.

Poems

Horoscopes for the Dead

S.M.

As always, I enjoy this man's poetry. Wry observations and surprising analogies. That said, this book wasn't as satisfying as some of his others. In any poetry collection, there are some poems that work for me and some that don't. I found many more that didn't in this one. I enjoyed this one: Table Talk Not long after we had sat down to dinner at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus, one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie-- asked if anyone had ever considered applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The differences between these two figures were much more striking than the differences between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu. If, the man with the tie continued, an object moving through space will never reach its destination because it is always limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half, then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die from the wounds inflicted by arrows: the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach. Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack. I think I'll have the trout, I told the waiter, for it was now my turn to order, but all through the elegant dinner I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian, a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances to his body, tied to a post with rope, even after the archers had packed it in and gone home. And I thought of the bullet never reaching the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head, the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl, and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch. The theories of Zeno floated above the table like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ, yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish, and after we ate and lifted our glasses, we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive, where people usually get where they are going-- where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor, where geese land with a splash on the surface of the pond, and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms-- and yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso, splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint, that popular subject of European religious painting. One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills. This one didn't appeal to me. Like many of the poems, it didn't seem to have much to say. I liked the description of the child's drawing, but connecting that to the idea of death news being delivered by truck failed for me. Delivery Moon in the upper window, shadow of my cooked pen on the page, and I find myself wishing that the news of my death might be delivered not by a dark truck but by a child's attempt to draw that truck-- the long rectangular box of the trailer, some lettering on the side, then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels, maybe the inscrutable profile of the driver, and puffs of white smoke issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky, only smaller.

Melody Izard

I try to find poets I like who pick dirt from their fingernails and compare it with the moon. I read of despair and myth and omens in the middle atmosphere. But I blink and am less than ambitions about finishing another line - much less going on to poem number two. I would never even consider reading the poem aloud to the Christmas meeting of my book group. But Billy. Sweet balding Billy. I can always find a poem that makes me smile. And then .... wait a minute ... there is some hint of the scent of myth and omens if you can look (or sniff - if I plan to stick with the sense of smell) deeper into the languishing lab's eyes or hear, (OK - I guess I have no intention of being consistent) past the Marco Polo playing children in the motel pool. Yes Billy lights the poetry path for me.

Horoscopes for the Dead Poems

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