'Among the best poems that Collins has ever written' ā NPR
In Water, Water Billy Collins writes with joy and wonder about the beauties and ironies of everyday life. The best poems, he believes, begin in clarity and end with a hint of the sublime: A cat learns to drink from a swimming pool. An astronaut recites Emily Dickinson in space. Here is a writer devotedly in love with the world around him, fascinated by its pleasures but generously sensitive of its pains.
Ever a laureate of the oblique, Collins is especially sensitive to disappearances and acts of concealment, sketching objects by the outlines their absence leaves: āEverything in this hard placeā, reflects one voice in āCrying in Classā, āis designed to disappear.ā From griefās soft echoes, to the atheist equally afraid of heaven and hell, Collins remains as keenly vigilant of the light as he does the shadows which dance at its edges.
āA poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan graceā The New Yorker
'Witty, wry and tender when it hurts, Water, Water is a pleasure to read and easy to give' ā The Washington Post