Ballistics

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 21, 2008

The latest from former U.S. laureate Collins (The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems) again shows the deft, often self-mocking touch that has made him one of America's bestselling poets: while this volume hardly breaks new ground, it should fly off the shelves. To his jokes about, and against, his own poetizing, Collins now adds two new emphases: on life in France, where (to judge by the poems) he has spent some time and (more pervasively) a preoccupation with the end of life. Collins is never carefree, but he is, as always, accessible and high-spirited, making light even when telling himself that nothing lasts: "Vermont, Early November" finds the poet in his kitchen, wringing his signature charm from the eternal carpe diem theme, "determined to seize firmly/ the second Wednesday of every month." For Collins, such are his stock in trade, humorous and serious at once. His tongue-in-cheek assault on the "gloom and doubt in our poetry" is his only remedy for the loneliness that (even for him) shadows all poems: "this is a poem, not a novel," he laments, "and the only characters here are you and I,/ alone in an imaginary room/ which will disappear after a few more lines."