Bruce Weber in the New York Times called Billy Collins “the most popular poet in America.” He is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently, The Rain in Portugal: Poems. In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a very long time” Press director Miller Williams, a poet as well, returned the poems to him in the “familiar self-addressed, stamped envelope.” He told Collins that there was good work here but that there was work to be done before he’d have a real collection he and the Press could be proud of: “Williams’s words were more encouragement than I had ever gotten before and more than enough to inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously than I had before.” This collection includes some of Collins’s most anthologized poems, including “Introduction to Poetry,” “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,” and “Advice to Writers.” Its success over the years is testament to Collins’s talent as one of our best poets, and as he writes in the preface, “this new edition . . . is a credit to the sustained vibrancy of the University of Arkansas Press and, I suspect, to the abiding spirit of its former director, my first editorial father.”
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and ...
Nine Horses, Billy Collins’s first book of new poems since Picnic, Lightning in 1998, is the latest curve in the phenomenal trajectory of this poet’s career.
Such strange braggadocio: “With an apple I want to astonish Paris!” I had gotten a manuscript together. A friend of mine suggested, “Send it down to Miller Williams.” So I sent Miller Williams about forty-five poems.
Watts, Edward, and David Rachels, eds. “Minor Native Voices.” The First West: Writing from the American Frontier 1776–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 333. CheriJohnson SEXTON, ANNE (1928–1974) Anne Sexton's poetry constitutes a vivid ...
‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ Carol Ann Duffy Readers will only have to open this book at random to realize the privation a life without Billy Collins has been.
The eighty varieties at Scott Farm are, to me, as fine a collection of artistic masterpieces as you'd find in any museum, just as moving and thought-provoking, and Zeke is a superb curator. He will even let you eat his collection.
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.
" This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate.
See Burroughs, William S. Leeds, Titan, 2:59 Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (Davidson), 2:90 Lee Yan Phou, 1:72 Left Out in the Rain (Snyder), 4:64 “Legacy ofJohn Brown, The” (Du Bois), 1:423 “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts, ...
Collins, Billy, “Introduction to Poetry,” The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 58. “Comic durchbricht in vieler Hinsicht die Grenzen,” Botschaft von Finnland, Berlin, 16 November 2009, ...