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Billy Bragg: Still Suitable for Miners
By Andrew Collins. 2013
'Love me or hate me. It's a great read’ - Billy Bragg He was a punk. He was a soldier.…
He was a flag-waver for the Labour Party and the miners. He is Billy Bragg, passionate protest folk singer and tireless promoter of political and humanitarian causes around the world. His life encapsulates so much about his generation: born in the late ’50s, passions forged by punk, politics shaped by Thatcherism, career inspired by engagement, hope provided by the end of the Cold War and ideology galvanised by what he sees as a ‘post-ideological’ twenty-first century. He adapts to survive: serious about compassion and accountability, he likes a laugh too, and has never forgotten where he comes from.Still Suitable for Miners is the official Billy Bragg story, tracing his life, family and career at close range from Barking to the present day. This 20th anniversary edition has been updated to include the rise of Corbyn, the unfolding of Brexit, Billy’s reclamation of skiffle and his overtures into Americana.Conversations with Billy Collins (Literary Conversations Series)
By John Cusatis. 2005
Billy Collins “puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called “hospitable” poems,…
which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet’s career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming—like his twelve volumes of poetry—these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.Musical Tables: Poems
By Billy Collins. 2022
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a…
collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, and each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence&“Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.&”—Billy CollinsYou can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the &‘fun&’ back in profundity,&” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to &“begin in Kansas and end in Oz.&”Now &“America&’s favorite poet&” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry&’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins&’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.3:00 AMOnly my handis asleep,but it&’s a start.Aimless love: new and selected poems
By Billy Collins. 2013
Previously published works and fifty-one new poems from the former U.S. poet laureate. In "Ode to a Desk Lamp" Collins…
compares his long connection with the "faithful light" to his fleeting personal relationships. Bestseller. 2013The rain in Portugal: poems
By Billy Collins. 2016
Fifty previously uncollected poems from the former U. S. poet laureate and author of Aimless Love (DB 77867). The selected…
poems examine the everyday, and the titular "The Rain in Portugal" pokes fun at Collins's penchant for unrhymed poetry. 2016The best American poetry, 2006: Series Editor David Lehman (The best American poetry)
By Billy Collins, David Lehman. 2006
"The Best American Poetry series offers a distinguished poet's selection of poems published in the course of a year. The…
guest editor for 2006 is Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, who has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in an array of styles and forms. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry - from Laura Cronk's marvelous "Sestina for the Newly Married" to the elegant limericks of R. S. Gwynn and from Reb Livingston on butter to Mark Halliday's "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women." In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he chose seventy-five poems from among the thousands he considered. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's thought-provoking foreword, The Best American Poetry 2006 is a brilliant addition to a series that links the most noteworthy verse and prose poems of our time to a readership as discerning as it is devoted to the art of poetry." -- Provided by publisherThe African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings That Make Surprising Sense
By Billy Collins, Daniel Menaker, Roz Chast. 2016
Inspired by his tenure at The New Yorker, this collection of comical, revelatory errors foraged from the wilds of everyday…
English comes with commentary by the author, illustrations by Roz Chast, and a foreword from Billy Collins. During his time at The New Yorker, Daniel Menaker happened across a superb spelling mistake: "The zebras were grazing on the African svelte." Fascinated by the idea of unintentionally meaningful spelling errors, he began to see that these gaffes--neither typos nor auto-corrects--are sometimes more interesting than their straight-laced counterparts. Through examples he has collected over the course of his decades-long career as an editor and writer, he brings us to a new understanding of language--how it's used, what it means, and what fun it can be. Illustrated by the inimitable Roz Chast, with a foreword from former poet laureate Billy Collins, The African Svelte offers thoughtful and intelligent exit Jesus. Menaker glances at familiar fumbles like "for all intensive purposes" and "doggy-dog world," but readers delighted by language will find themselves turning the pages with baited breath to discover fresh howlers that have them laughing off their dairy airs.Sailing alone around the room: new and selected poems
By Billy Collins. 2001
Selections of poetry from four previous collections with twenty new poems by the United States Poet Laureate. "Osso Buco" celebrates…
a savory homecooked meal while "Forgetfulness" deplores the mind's lapses of memory over time, and "Nightclub" evokes billowy smoke, rhythmic dreamy atmosphere, and mellow saxophone tones. 2001The best American poetry, 2006: Series Editor David Lehman
By Billy Collins, David Lehman. 2006
Former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Sailing Alone around the Room (DB 53069) presents seventy-five poems chosen for their…
depth, voice, and "sense of journey." Includes Robert Hass's "The Problem of Describing Color," Charles Simic's "House of Cards," and Liz Rosenberg's "The Other Woman's Point of View." 2006Poetry 180: a turning back to poetry
By Billy Collins. 2003
Anthology of contemporary verse that grew from former U.S. poet laureate Collins's project to make poetry accessible and inviting to…
teenagers. Features one short selection to be read during morning announcements each day of the school year. Includes notes on the poets. YA appeal. 2003How to Write a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry"
By Tania Runyan. 2015
Is it possible to teach someone how to write a poem? Or does poetry simply "come from the heart" or…
from a special talent only some can ever hope to have? Of course there's no formula for writing an amazing poem. If poems came with instructions like IKEA(R) coffee tables, we'd all be missing the point. But this book will give you some strategies-some tools, if you will-to assemble your personal, imaginative raw materials into poems that will surprise and intrigue. These strategies are focused primarily on free verse, yet many of the concepts can also be applied to form poetry, at both the inception and revision stages.The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
By Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins. 2000
Emily Dickinson lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, dedicating herself to writing a "letter to the world"--the 1,775 poems…
left unpublished at her death in 1886. Today, Dickinson stands in the front rank of American poets. This enthralling collection includes more than four hundred poems that were published between Dickinson's death and 1900. They express her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called "the landscape of the soul." And as Billy Collins suggests in his Introduction, "In the age of the workshop, the reading, the poetry conference and festival, Dickinson reminds us of the deeply private nature of literary art."Whale Day: And Other Poems
By Billy Collins. 2020
A new collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and &“America&’s favorite poet&” (The Wall Street Journal) Billy Collins&’s new…
collection brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made him one of our country&’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins&’s reputation as one of America&’s most interesting and durable poets.The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems
By Billy Collins. 1998
Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins. With his distinct voice and accessible language, America's two-term…
Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed. Like the present book's title, Collins's poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, "Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone"-but also with quiet observation, intense wonder, and a reverence for the everyday: "The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows. / They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth-the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, / the American poets gazing out / at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise." Through simple language, Collins shows that good poetry doesn't have to be obscure or incomprehensible, qualities that are perhaps the real trouble with most "serious" poetry: "By now, it should go without saying / that what the oven is to the baker / and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner / so the window is to the poet." In this dazzling new collection, his first in three years, Collins explores boyhood, jazz, love, the passage of time, and, of course, writing-themes familiar to Collins's fans but made new here. Gorgeous, funny, and deeply empathetic, Billy Collins's poetry is a window through which we see our lives as if for the first time.From the Hardcover edition.Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
By Billy Collins. 2001
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from…
his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.From the Trade Paperback edition.The Rain in Portugal: Poems
By Billy Collins. 2016
From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering nearly 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, here Collins 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. On Rhyme It's possible that a stitch in time might save as many as twelve or as few as three, and I have no trouble remembering that September has thirty days. So do June, November, and April. I like a cat wearing a chapeau or a trilby, Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa, old men who are not from Nantucket, and how life can seem almost unreal when you are gently rowing a boat down a stream. That's why instead of recalling today that it mostly pours in Spain, I am going to picture the rain in Portugal, how it falls on the hillside vineyards, on the surface of the deep harbors where fishing boats are swaying, and in the narrow alleys of the cities where three boys in tee shirts are kicking a soccer ball in the rain, ignoring the window-cries of their mothers.Ballistics: Poems
By Billy Collins. 2008
Nine Horses: Poems
By Billy Collins. 2002
Nine Horses, Billy Collins's first book of new poems since Picnic, Lightning in 1998, is the latest curve in the…
phenomenal trajectory of this poet's career. Already in his forties when he debuted with a full-length book, The Apple That Astonished Paris, Collins has become the first poet since Robert Frost to combine high critical acclaim with broad popular appeal. And, as if to crown this success, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001-2002, and reappointed for 2002-2003. What accounts for this remarkable achievement is the poems themselves, quiet meditations grounded in everyday life that ascend effortlessly into eye-opening imaginative realms. These new poems, in which Collins continues his delicate negotiations between the clear and the mysterious, the comic and the elegiac, are sure to sustain and increase his audience of avid readers.From the Hardcover edition.Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
By Billy Collins. 2009
"Billy Collins puts the 'fun' back in 'profundity.' "--Alice FultonFrom the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins…
comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in twelve years. Aimless Love combines more than fifty new poems with selections from four previous books--Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins's unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard on every page, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience. His work is featured in top literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he sells out reading venues all across the country. Appearing regularly in The Best American Poetry series, his poems appeal to readers and live audiences far and wide and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins's poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder. In the poet's own words, he hopes that his poems "begin in Kansas and end in Oz." Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this "poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace" (The New Yorker).Envoy Go, little book, out of this house and into the world, carriage made of paper rolling toward town bearing a single passenger beyond the reach of this jittery pen and far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp. It is time to decamp, put on a jacket and venture outside, time to be regarded by other eyes, bound to be held in foreign hands. So off you go, infants of the brain, with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice: stay out as late as you like, don't bother to call or write, and talk to as many strangers as you can.Praise for Aimless Love"America's favorite poet."--The Wall Street Journal "[Billy Collins's] poetry presents simple observations, which create a shared experience between [him] and his readers, while further revealing how he takes life's everyday humdrum experiences and makes them vibrant. While Collins's previous collections have already validated his brilliance and staying power as a poet, he continues to reveal an ever-growing maturity."--The Times Leader"In selections from his four most recent collections . . . and fifty-one glimmering new poems, former poet laureate and reader favorite Collins, the maestro of the running-brook line and the clever pivot, celebrates the resonance and absurdity of what might be called the poet's attention-surfeit disorder. . . . But Collins' droll wit is often a diversionary tactic, so that when he strikes you with the hard edge of his darker visions, you reel."--BooklistFrom the Hardcover edition.Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems
By Billy Collins. 2011
Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this new…
collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, the verbal gifts that earned him the title "America's most popular poet" are on full display. The poems here cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union. With simple diction and effortless turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac, as in the opening lines of the title poem: Every morning since you disappeared for good, I read about you in the newspaper along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news. Some days I am reminded that today will not be a wildly romantic time for you . . . And in this reflection on his own transience: It doesn't take much to remind me what a mayfly I am, what a soap bubble floating over the children's party. Standing under the bones of a dinosaur in a museum does the trick every time or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon. Smart, lyrical, and not afraid to be funny, these new poems extend Collins's reputation as a poet who occupies a special place in the consciousness of readers of poetry, including the many he has converted to the genre.Note to Readers: adjusting the size of the type on your e-reading device may affect the line formatting of this eBook. We have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped to a new line in a poem will be noticeably indented.