Musical Tables, Billy Collins
Musical Tables, Billy Collins
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Musical Tables
Poems

Author: Billy Collins

Narrator: Billy Collins

Unabridged: 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/15/2022

Synopsis

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 Collins

You 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 AM

Only my hand
is asleep,
but it’s a start.

About Billy Collins

Billy Collins served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, in 2001 to 2003, and then as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. He is the author of several collections of poetry. He has won the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry, the Norman Mailer Prize for Poetry, the Levinson Prize, and the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and been named Poetry magazine’s Poet of the Year and a New York Public Library Literary Lion, among many other awards and honors. He is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the senior distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute in Florida.

Reviews

Goodreads review by s.penkevich

I will always thank Billy Collins for being one of my introductions to modern poetry and how upon discovering him I was also getting into many of his other contemporaries like Charles Simic, Mary Oliver or W.S. Merwin and truly falling in love with poetry. Appointed US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003,......more

Goodreads review by Karen

This book was another library staff recommendation. I found myself attracted to the cover of a cow sitting on the sofa. And questions began to form… Who is this author? What will appeal to me, about reading his poetry? His work, as described by him, is considered small poems, a way of including large......more

Goodreads review by Lydia

This book is filled with short poems. Even though its a fast read and loaded with short poems, I loved it. Its very thought provoking. I loved the title of the book and the cover. Its very thought provoking. I loved the title of the book and the cover. You read the poem and not understand what its t......more

Goodreads review by Kasa

Further proof that Billy Collins deserves every accolade he receives. His trademark humor interspersed with wisdom, all presented in tiny packages.......more

Quotes

“The poetry of Billy Collins has a kindness that glitters with hard truth, and in Musical Tables he gives us a book of short, witty, often luminous snapshots of our sad and funny world.”—Paul Simon

“Collins’s short poems warm the soul. Like koans and haiku, these micro-lyrics roam a range of tone and feeling, from elegies to epiphanies to bone-dry witticisms. . . . His formal compression is deft; his insights, arresting.”—Oprah Daily

“Collins has said that the short poem is a sort of test for a poet: just as an artist should be able to draw a simple chicken, the poet should be able to channel meaning, emotion, profundity, and humor all through a couple of lines. Perhaps Collins is also aware of society’s rapidly diminishing attention span, but he has created an undaunting, readable book of poetry that will appeal to all ages and hit you where it hurts.”—LitHub

“Billy Collins, a former poet laureate of the United States, is a real gem. He’s a poet whose writing manages to be accessible, poignant and funny at the same time.”—The Palm Beach Post

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