Ballistics
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
It is no understatement to say that Billy Collins has found poetry a whole new audience across the English-speaking world. No poet writing today insists on such open, direct and courteous engagement with the reader, and no poet has shown the common experience to be such an astonishing and singular one. Collins’ gift is to make the reader believe that everything is unfolding in real time and in living speech; his poetry always has the sheen and vibrancy of the present moment. While Ballistics addresses the most grave and serious of subjects - death and love, solitude and aging - Collins’ light touch and lighter spirit never desert him. Even in his darkest verses, Collins never fails to remind us of the sheer miracle, comedy and strangeness of our simply being here.
‘The teasing, buoyant images in Ballistics are firmly anchored in visions of too-quiet mornings, droplets of water, cold marble and bare light bulbs. But he now writes, more simply and assuredly than he used to, about the flights of imagination that keep melancholy at bay . . . Ballistics glows with the confidence of a writer fully aware of his work’s power to delight’ New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
