The Guardian's Take on Billy Collins's Aimless Love

The Guardian's Ben Wilkinson reviews the Billy Collins collection, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, published here in 2013 and quite recently in the UK (Picador). "Though we calculate between its revivifying promise and its emotional cost, the poem suggests, most of us are victims to love’s unpredictable strangeness," writes Wilkinson. And yet:

What frustrates in Collins’s poetry is hardly this balancing act between the whimsical and the moving. Rather, it is the kind of predictable laziness that creeps into many a gifted poet’s writing, not least after they have had their share of prizes, fellowships and, in Collins’s case, a publisher bidding war resulting in a six-figure advance. There are several gems in Aimless Love that everyone should read: “No Time” is a bittersweet familial recollection reminiscent, in its brevity and precise imagery, of Tony Harrison; “Ballistics” conjures a violent daydream that captures our petty enmities; “Writing in the Afterlife” blurs the mythical crossing of the Styx with the “infernal process” of poetry itself, a purgatory where “not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens”. But for each of these inventive, crisp, clear-eyed poems, there are those that veer towards the poetic equivalent of art that matches the furniture: cosy, winsome, mild-mannered, forgettable. “If ever there was a spring day so perfect”, begins “Today”, before ambling about as if it were a sponsored ad for the great outdoors; “Cemetery Ride” is schmaltzy and similarly meandering, as the poet writes of the “dazzling sun”, “blue sky” and “sandy paths”: a “glorious April day” to resurrect the dead, no less, and pop them in a bicycle’s “wire basket”.

Collins’s besetting sin, however, is his readiness to write about writing and the writing life. Whether it be an “Ode to a Desk Lamp”, “Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire”, or “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne”, “jotting down little things” in a “life of continual self-expression” comes far too easily, and it shows. A thin oeuvre is perhaps one of the few courtesies to the reader that Collins has overlooked; his prolific pen has produced some wonderful poems, but they risk getting lost...

Read the full review at The Guardian.