Horoscopes for the Dead
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
However arresting, outlandish, or hilarious, the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead are typically prompted by the familiar things of the world: dogs, stars, food, love, and marriage as well as life's local triumphs and disappointments, joys and shames. Collins's gift is to unlock the mysterious in the ordinary, and he is always careful to take his reader with him. Indeed, no other living poet has done more to reengage and revitalize poetry's readership, or so deservedly earned its trust.
Few poets have his ability to mix bold, unadorned statements with lyric invention and imaginative richness. And here in these new poems, Collins's inimitable tone - wry, smart, funny, and wise - takes on a darker shade, as the poems declare a deep awareness of transience and mortality. The result is the revelation of a world more precious, more fragile, richer in colour and form than ever.
Praise for Billy Collins
‘A writer . . . fully aware of his work’s power to delight’ New York Times
‘A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace’ New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1990s belonged to Billy Collins in the same way that the 1980s belonged to Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten). Collins's gently ironic, gently elegiac work the mirror image of, say, Jonathan Franzen's suburban delvings has slowly constructed a pitch-perfect purgatory, and this death-themed ninth collection seems to want to make it as literal as possible: it opens as the speaker stands "before the joined grave of my parents" and asks, "What do you think of my new glasses?" In a poem titled "Hell," the speaker has "a feeling that is much worse/ than shopping for a mattress in a mall,// of greater duration without question,/ and there is no random pitchforking here,/ no licking flames to fear,/ only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding." That this feeling is never quite articulated over the course of 50-odd poems is not to its detriment: despite the prosaic settings and everyday language, Collins is after the big questions: of life, death, and how to live. But the world is not of his making, and his is a temperament oddly suited to a world where "the correct answer" to questions like why the stars appear as they do, strike "not like a bolt of lightning/ but more like a heavy bolt of cloth."
