Billy Collins

I love finding new (new to me, anyway) poets to explore. Last week’s Saturday Poem(s) in the Guardian Review were by Billy Collins. Today seems to be about most of the days we’ve been having lately, if you ignore the biting cold that strangely crept in with the sunbeams in the past two.

I went looking for more, and ended up with quite a haul. Introduction To Poetry and Dear Reader seem like good ones to start with.

Man Listening To Disc and Marginalia are creepily accurate portrayals of aspects of my two main preoccupations.

Japan is beautifully erotic. Picnic, Lightning is about those sudden moments of clarity that elevate the mundane to the meaningful, and is also incidentally hosted on Nabokovilia, a pretty cool site that collects and explains Nabokov references in other literary works.

(If anyone wants to buy me The Annotated Lolita, please feel free. If not, then please buy it for yourself, it’s fantastic. In related news, I’m currently marvelling my way through The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, which, though not even ranked among Nabokov’s better books, still beats almost everything else I’ve read recently hands down.)