NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the former United States Poet Laureate and
New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a collection of
more than 125 small poems, all of them new, and each a thought or
observation compressed to its emotional essence
"Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages
looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract
painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have
faith in poets who can go short."--Billy Collins
You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the
light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the 'fun' back in
profundity," says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to
"begin in Kansas and end in Oz."
Now "America's favorite poet" (The Wall Street Journal) has found a
new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins
writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality,
absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor
limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to
condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry
of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan,
and Charles Simic, and written with Collins's recognizable wit and
wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets
channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.
3:00 AM
Only my hand
is asleep,
but it's a start.
