Out on the lawn.(Verse chronicle)

I should have reviewed Billy Collins's Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn't stand the excitement. (1) Collins is that rarity among American poets, one with popular appeal, easy to read as a billboard, genial as a Sunday golfer, and not so awful you want to cut your throat after reading him. Many readers complain that poetry is difficult to understand, the way they grumble when an opera is sung in Italian or resent a Czech film with subtitles. Art isn't supposed to be such hard work, is it? Billy Collins writes poetry for those people, and they appreciate it.

Collins specializes in goofy, slightly offbeat subjects. If you want a poem about mice who play with matches, or about that song repeating uncontrollably in your head, or about feeling sorry for Whistler's mother, he's your man. Angst is not a word he's learned, or Weltschmerz (he may have learned Schadenfreude, but he's forgotten it). What he loves is the cheesy sentiment of the everyday: "I peered in at the lobsters//lying on the bottom of an illuminated/ tank which was filled to the brim/ with their copious tears". To the brim! Or worse, if anything could be worse than weeping lobsters, he loves everything--he's got a heart big as all outdoors:

 
   This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, 
   I fell in love with a wren 
   and later in the day with a mouse 
   the cat had dropped under the dining room 
   table. 
 
   In the shadows of an autumn evening, 
   I fell for a seamstress 
   still at her machine in the tailor's window, 
   and later for a bowl of broth, 
   steam rising like smoke from a naval battle. 

You want to stop him before he becomes a public hazard. It's tough to read a poet who has overdosed on some mood elevator, who is every goddamned minute "cockeyed with gratitude."

Collins has been called a philistine, but you can read a lot of contemporary poetry without coming across references to William Carlos Williams, Coventry Patmore, Walter Pater, or Clarissa. He's something worse, a poet who doesn't respect his art enough to take it seriously. Once or twice an image makes you stop: a dead groundhog, say, like "a small Roman citizen,/ with his prosperous belly,// his faint smile,/ and his one stiff forearm raised/as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar." Then it's back to a kind of NPR commentary on contemporary mores, like the use of trompe l'oeil in your kitchen. Collins makes cheap art for the masses, like posters of a Monet. Once you've seen a real Monet, posters can't compare.

The best poem here is about the afterlife. The skies there are sulphurous, the dead souls crowded into boats, bent over writing tablets, under the gaze of hellish boatmen. What are the dead working on? Poetry assignments.

 
   how could anyone have guessed 
 
   that as soon as we arrived 
   we would be asked to describe this place 
   and to include as much detail as possible--not 
   just the water, he insists, 
 
   rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water, 
   not simply the shackles, but the rusty, 
   iron, ankle-shredding shackles--and 
   that our next assignment would be 
 
   to jot down, off the tops of our heads, 
   our thoughts and feelings about being dead.