Billy Collins

Presents a volume of more than fifty new poems accompanied by a generous gathering from the author's collections of the past decade, lending insight into his overall poetic achievements and his use of playful, ironic, and melodic language.

""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 limmerick, and certainly not a gimmick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual content into small spaces. Taken together the...

Features work from each of the United States' forty-three poets laureate since the post was established in 1937, with introductions and historical and literary context for each, including William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Rita Dove.