In each of the short poems in Billy Collins's Musical Tables, the former United States Poet Laureate tempers his characteristically jocular voice with what he calls the "thrill of mortality" – flashes of profundity amongst the mundane, startling reminders of the wonder of being alive.
Through the brevity of these poems, Collins' knack for coaxing the poetry out of the everyday becomes ever more refined. Whether reflecting on mornings spent in the thicket of Los Angeles traffic, or turning over clichés on the tongue until old metaphors become new again, Musical Tables is Billy Collins at his most meditative: brief, and all the more brilliant for it.
'America's favourite poet' – Wall Street Journal Billy Collins is the author of twelve poetry collections, including Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, Whale Day, and Horoscopes for the Dead. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Lehman College, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001 to 2003, and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife in Westchester County, NY. From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love comes a collection of more than 125 small, incisively brilliant poems which, in his own words, "begin in Kansas and end in Oz."
