Sign-In
Cart
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Hardcover
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN10: 0375503803
ISBN13: 9780375503801
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.73 Width: 5.82 Depth: 9.12
Language: English
Awards: ALA Notable Books
ISBN13: 9780375503801
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.73 Width: 5.82 Depth: 9.12
Language: English
Awards: ALA Notable Books
High, most encouraging tidings--that is how Billy Collins, the widely read and widely acclaimed poet, describes the music in his poem about the gospel singing group The Sensational Nightingales. The same phrase applies, just as joyfully, to the arrival of Sailing Alone Around the Room, a landmark collection of new and selected poems by this Guggenheim Fellow, NPR contributor, New York Public Library Literary Lion, and incomparably popular performer of his own good works.
From four earlier collections, which have secured for him a national reputation, Collins offers the lyric equivalent of an album of Greatest Hits. In Forgetful-ness, memories of the contents of a novel retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. In Osso Buco, a poem about gustatory pleasure, the lion of content-ment places a warm heavy paw on the poet's chest. In Marginalia, he catalogs the scrawled comments of books' previous readers: 'Absolutely, ' they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. 'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man!' And he also serves us a generous portion of new poems, including Man Listening to Disc, a jazz trip with headphones, and The Iron Bridge, a wildly speculative, moving elegy.
Whether old or new, these poems will catch their readers by exhilarating surprise. They may begin with irony and end in lyric transcendence. They may open with humor and close with grief. They may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end with infinity. Wise, funny, sad, stealthy, and always perfectly clear, these poems will not be departing for that little fishing village with no phones for a long, long time. Billy Collins, possessed of a unique lyric voice, is one of American poetry's most sensational nightingales.
Whether old or new, these poems will catch their readers by exhilarating surprise. They may begin with irony and end in lyric transcendence. They may open with humor and close with grief. They may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end with infinity. Wise, funny, sad, stealthy, and always perfectly clear, these poems will not be departing for that little fishing village with no phones for a long, long time. Billy Collins, possessed of a unique lyric voice, is one of American poetry's most sensational nightingales.
1 different editions
Also available
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
$33.00
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
$19.94
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
$18.00
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
$18.05
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover
$24.70