Every week I’ll sample the goods and spit out the juiciest pieces of prose and poetry for you—heavy on flavor, light on fat. This week: a smattering of delightful insight in the form of poems, from the charming Cheshire Cat of a poet, Billy Collins.

Ballistics—Billy Collins (Random House, 2008)

Basic Ingredients:

Billy C. is, to me, the Cheshire Cat of poetry. I’ve been lucky enough to hear him speak a few times and have always been left smiling and scratching my head at how an older, balding, white guy could so easily give voice to the inner workings of my fears, my obsessions, and my heart, all the while sardonically poking fun at himself and everyone and everything.

Like the Cheshire Cat playfully taunting Alice with the deep philosophical questions of life, Billy Collins teases the reader while inviting deeper philosophical undertones. They are so real, so based in every day activities and observations that they feel easy. One is inclined to let down her guard and nestle in. The every day language and images stack up in a precise way to leave you, at the culmination of the poem, staggering backwards as it playfully slaps you around a little. His poems remind you that reading poetry is easy (read: intuitive rather than cognitive) because it originates in who we are, but it is also a carefully honed craft attempting to articulate those deeply human moments and feelings that words are always grasping to emulate.

Now, for some concrete examples to give some proof to my pedestalization (yes, I made that one up to fit my purpose). I honed in on B.C.’s latest work, Ballistics, which you can happily and easily find on the shelves of most major book stores (a minor feat in reading poetry is actually finding the poetry). This collection exemplifies Billy Collins’ perfection of the plain-tongued philosopher.

…But where are you, reader,

who have not paused in your walk

to look over my shoulder

to see what I am jotting in this notebook?

Alone in this city,

I sometimes wonder what you look like,

if you are wearing a flannel shirt

or a wraparound skirt held together by a pin.

But every time I turn around

you have fled through a crease in the air

to a quiet room where the shutters are closed

against the heat of the afternoon,

where there is only the sound of your breathing

and every so often, the turning of a page.

—excerpt from “August in Paris”

This is the first poem in the collection. In an attempt to thwart my habit of flipping through poetry books and reading poems at happenchance, I decided to try to read this one front to back in one sitting. I was rewarded with not only a most endearing epitaph (“Even as a cow she was lovely”—Ovid, Metamorphoses), but a wonderfully fitting first poem to set the tone for the rest of the collection. Throughout, you continue to get the feeling that Collins is overtly aware of the reader, even in his moments of reflective solitude. I don’t mean to say it feels overly conscious—more like mindful of the long-distance relationship a writer holds with his readers.

My chronological attempt didn’t last more than half of the book (I resorted back to the art of page flipping—a deft and difficult art I now firmly believe lends a touch of enchantment and a particular sensation of destiny that personalizes ones experience with a collection), but I did take note that while the first poem addresses the reader, the last poem addresses the book on its journey to the reader out in the big scary world (Genius!):

So off you go, infants of the brain,

with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

stay out as late as you like,

don’t bother to call or write,

and talk to as many strangers as you can.

—excerpt from “Envoy”

And lastly, I leave you with a snippet from a poem I just randomly flipped to and fell in love with:

When I happened to notice myself

walking naked past a wall-length mirror

one spring morning

in a house by the water

where a friend was letting me stay,

I looked like one of those silhouettes

that illustrate the evolution of man,

but not exactly the most recent figure.

—excerpt from “The Idea of Natural History at Key West”

(P.S. By far one of my favorite poems in the collection is Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant, but it is too good to excerpted, so you’ll have to pick up the book to sample that one.)

Next Week: horses and Colorado and gods and stuff.