Billy Collins

"Billy Collin's first new book in three years contains more than forty new poems that showcase [his] generosity, playfulness, and wisdom"--

Poems

The Rain in Portugal

Jaden Nelson

DNF-It was OK. I wanted to try Billy Collins out and while some of the poems appealed to me, most of them were just missing something, they felt a little bit flat. I thought it was Billy Collins' poetry in general that I didn't like, but I am reading  Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems and I like most of the poems Collins has written there. I guess this collection just wasn't for me.

jam 🍯

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him “America’s favorite poet.” The Rain in Portugal—a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer—sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical—“the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis”—to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry. Praise for The Rain in Portugal “Nothing in Billy Collins’s twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that’s the charm of this collection.”—The Washington Post “This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin.”—Library Journal “Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid.”—Booklist

The Rain in Portugal Poems

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