Questions About Angels (Pitt Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Collins, Billy

4.22

1,714 ratings by Goodreads

9780822942115: Questions About Angels (Pitt Poetry Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822942119 ISBN 13: 9780822942115

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

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Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours."

This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Questions About Angels--one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s--is remarkable for its wry, inquisitive voice and its sheer imaginative range. Edward Hirsch selected this classic book for the National Poetry Series, and each of Collins's poems-from his meditation on forgetfulness to his musings on the behavior of angels-is an exploration of imaginative possibilities. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

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Review:

Billy Collins has a knack for making the familiar exotic and the arcane instantly accessible. His 1991 collection, Questions About Angels, is a loving and often amused search for "the infinite / permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters." This phrase comes from an ode to his first literary experience--and needless to say, Collins is more honest than most of us might be. Though he would later discover "frightening Heathcliff" and "frightened Pip," and even Adam and Eve, fiction for him began with another famous pair: Dick and Jane. Throughout this witty volume, he explores other heroes who have expanded his vistas--including Goya, Kafka, ancient mapmakers, Constable, and more than one lexicographer in hot pursuit of le mot juste:

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country
that lie beyond speech
Noah Webster and his assistants are moving
across the landscape tracking down a new word.

Collins makes you remember your initial delight in metaphor and simile. In "The First Geniuses," for instance, he imagines an era before "the orchestra of history / has had time to warm up," before inventors and artists could quite suss out how to use their gifts:

They have yet to discover fire, much less invent the wheel,
so they wander a world mostly dark and motionless
wondering what to do with their wisdom
like young girls wonder what to do with their hair.

Though his world is heavily populated by painting and literature, several melancholy, cigarette-packed love poems make it clear that people have equal sway. Yet Collins is always intent on proving that art, too, is experience. In "Metamorphosis" he dreams of waking up as the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. "I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies. / I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face." No one should be surprised to discover that his wish was partly granted. In 1992, that institution named Collins--with a perfectly straight face?--a "Literary Lion." --Kerry Fried

From the Publisher:

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. To celebrate his years as U.S. Poet Laureate, The University of Pittsburgh Press is pleased to announce these special limited editions, in hardcover, of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation during the 1990s. (See also Picnic, Lightning, ISBN 0822940663; and The Art of Drowning, ISBN 0822938936.)

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