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Horoscopes For The Dead (2011)

by Billy Collins(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1400064929 (ISBN13: 9781400064922)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Random House

review 1: As a disclaimer, I am not the biggest fan of Collins's style of poetry but I don't hate it either. However, this collection didn't feel as strong to me as others I have read of his. He writes simply and cleanly while often adding a surprising depth to his poems. This collection, however, merely felt simple. There were few poems that required me to take a breath after reading; it was a collection that I felt comfortable reading straight through, which is not my preferred method of reading poetry.
review 2: As always, I enjoy this man's poetry. Wry observations and surprising analogies. That said, this book wasn't as satisfying as some of his others. In any poetry collection, there are some poems that work for me and some that don't. I found many more that didn't... more in this one. I enjoyed this one: Table TalkNot long after we had sat down to dinnerat a long table in a restaurant in Chicagoand were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus, one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie--asked if anyone had ever consideredapplying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdomof St. Sebastian. The differences between these two figureswere much more striking than the differencesbetween the Cornish hen and the trout amandineI was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu. If, the man with the tie continued, an object moving through spacewill never reach its destination because it is alwayslimited to cutting the distance to its goal in half, then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not diefrom the wounds inflicted by arrows:the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach. Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack. I think I'll have the trout, I told the waiter,for it was now my turn to order,but all through the elegant dinnerI kept thinking of the arrows forever nearingthe pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian,a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distancesto his body, tied to a post with rope,even after the archers had packed it in and gone home. And I thought of the bullet never reachingthe wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch. The theories of Zeno floated above the tablelike thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ, yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouthdelivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,and after we ate and lifted our glasses, we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the streetthen walked our separate ways in the world where thingsdo arrive,where people usually get where they are going--where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,where geese land with a splash on the surface of the pond,and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in yourarms--and yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint, that popular subject of European religious painting. One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills. This one didn't appeal to me. Like many of the poems, it didn't seem to have much to say. I liked the description of the child's drawing, but connecting that to the idea of death news being delivered by truck failed for me. DeliveryMoon in the upper window,shadow of my cooked pen on the page,and I find myself wishing that the news of my deathmight be delivered not by a dark truckbut by a child's attempt to draw that truck--the long rectangular box of the trailer,some lettering on the side,then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,maybe the inscrutable profile of the driver,and puffs of white smokeissuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowersand similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky,only smaller. less

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