Poetry
![Billy Collins - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001LHV6DQ.jpg)
Whale Day: And Other Poems
A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal
"The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday."-The Wall Street Journal
Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins 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 poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday."-The Wall Street Journal
Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins 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.
Readers Top Reviews
MDI ChefGeorge Parke
Billy Collins evokes sometimes powerful, sometimes delicate images in his poetry. It’s hard to read a book of his poems without having the feeling that “I couldn’t have said it better.”
Stewart Salowitz
I never miss a book by Billy Collins - he's just a wonderful observer of the human condition and expresses it in poetry. "Walking My Seventy-Five Year Old Dog" and "Sleeping on My Side" alone are worth the price of admission. Might I also suggest you go online to find Collins reading his terrific "Best Cigarette" from a few years ago .. a poet reading his own work is a real art form.
Heather D. Nelson
Billy Collins is a favorite poet of mine anyway, but Whale Day did NOT disappoint! His use of prose paints the most amazing pictures. The little surprise twists are whimsical. Truly a joy to read from cover to cover and then cover to cover again! Certainly this will be a permanent addition to my poetry collection.
Carlos
"Whale Days and Other Poems." I've read and listened to Billy Collins periodically over the years, always admiring his offhanded approach to modern poetry. His appeal is wider than deep, in my estimation, and "Whale Days . . . " follows a glibness that is pleasing more than philosophical. He is a perfect example of "everyone's favorite poet."
Scott&Scott (aka Rom
Another disappointing mail-it-in collection by a poet whose playfulness I used to love. The “I” in these poems is so loud and prominent, the reader is in danger of being spooked and taking refuge in whatever navel Collins is gazing into these days. Personal confessional poetry is one thing, but by the end, I wished Collins would dare to write a single verse that wasn’t somehow self-referential (and often cloying).
Short Excerpt Teaser
One
Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog
She's painfully slow,
so I often have to stop and wait
while she examines some roadside weeds
as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.
And she's not a pretty sight anymore,
dragging one of her hind legs,
her coat too matted to brush or comb,
and a snout white as a marshmallow.
We usually walk down a disused road
that runs along the edge of a lake,
whose surface trembles in a high wind
and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.
We don't walk very far before
she sits down on her worn haunches
and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.
Then it's time to carry her back to the car.
Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,
I realize I should tell you
she's not really seventy-five. She's fourteen.
I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense
of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.
I mean who really cares about another person's dog?
Everything else I've said is true,
except the part about her being fourteen.
I mean she's old, but not that old,
and it's not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.
Contemporary Americans
I was trying to make my way
across a busy street in San Francisco,
while carrying the new anthology of poetry
I'd been flipping through earlier that morning-
with my pot of tea and two pieces of cinnamon toast-
in which I was wedged between James Tate and Bob Dylan
because the poets were arranged old to young, according to age.
I had to avoid a couple of cars,
cross over two sets of trolley tracks,
and dodge a guy with a ski cap on a bicycle
in order to get across the street and enter
one of the city's many hospitable parks
with their hedges, benches, and shade trees
and often girls on a blanket, a juggler, an old man doing tai-chi.
And that's where I lay down on the soft grass,
closed my eyes, and after a little while
began to picture the three of us lined up in a row
according to the editor's wishes,
sliding out of our mothers in order, one after the other,
then ending up pressed together on a shelf
in a corner bookstore, yodeling away in the dark.
Paris in May
A teddy bear in a store window,
three housepainters
waiting to cross a boulevard,
a woman in a café, her red nails
on a man's nape while she smokes-
what are we to make of all this?
In the church of Saint-Sulpice,
the Virgin holds her baby to her chest
as she stands on the round earth,
appearing to be unaware
of the serpent she is crushing with one foot.
Outside, four stone lions guard a fountain.
Is this a puzzle I am meant to solve
before the evening bells ring again-
here a man wearing a newspaper hat,
there a child alone on a flowery balcony?
An outdoor table on Rue Cassette
seemed a good enough place to sort things out.
And sure enough,
after two milky-green glasses of Pernod,
the crowd flowed around me like a breeze,
and I found a link between my notebook
and the soft Parisian sky,
both being almost the same pale shade of blue.
Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog
She's painfully slow,
so I often have to stop and wait
while she examines some roadside weeds
as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.
And she's not a pretty sight anymore,
dragging one of her hind legs,
her coat too matted to brush or comb,
and a snout white as a marshmallow.
We usually walk down a disused road
that runs along the edge of a lake,
whose surface trembles in a high wind
and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.
We don't walk very far before
she sits down on her worn haunches
and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.
Then it's time to carry her back to the car.
Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,
I realize I should tell you
she's not really seventy-five. She's fourteen.
I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense
of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.
I mean who really cares about another person's dog?
Everything else I've said is true,
except the part about her being fourteen.
I mean she's old, but not that old,
and it's not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.
Contemporary Americans
I was trying to make my way
across a busy street in San Francisco,
while carrying the new anthology of poetry
I'd been flipping through earlier that morning-
with my pot of tea and two pieces of cinnamon toast-
in which I was wedged between James Tate and Bob Dylan
because the poets were arranged old to young, according to age.
I had to avoid a couple of cars,
cross over two sets of trolley tracks,
and dodge a guy with a ski cap on a bicycle
in order to get across the street and enter
one of the city's many hospitable parks
with their hedges, benches, and shade trees
and often girls on a blanket, a juggler, an old man doing tai-chi.
And that's where I lay down on the soft grass,
closed my eyes, and after a little while
began to picture the three of us lined up in a row
according to the editor's wishes,
sliding out of our mothers in order, one after the other,
then ending up pressed together on a shelf
in a corner bookstore, yodeling away in the dark.
Paris in May
A teddy bear in a store window,
three housepainters
waiting to cross a boulevard,
a woman in a café, her red nails
on a man's nape while she smokes-
what are we to make of all this?
In the church of Saint-Sulpice,
the Virgin holds her baby to her chest
as she stands on the round earth,
appearing to be unaware
of the serpent she is crushing with one foot.
Outside, four stone lions guard a fountain.
Is this a puzzle I am meant to solve
before the evening bells ring again-
here a man wearing a newspaper hat,
there a child alone on a flowery balcony?
An outdoor table on Rue Cassette
seemed a good enough place to sort things out.
And sure enough,
after two milky-green glasses of Pernod,
the crowd flowed around me like a breeze,
and I found a link between my notebook
and the soft Parisian sky,
both being almost the same pale shade of blue.
