Picnic, Lightning

Billy Collins's poetry is heartbreakingly beautiful. It is also wise, funny, and brilliant. My ten favorites keep shifting all the time. Ovid is in again; so is Billy Collins.

* Gerald Stern *

Billy Collins writes a kind of poetry that is . . . graceful, inviting, generous-hearted, able to treat engagingly of life's pleasures as well as its pain. . . . entering a poem by Mr. Collins is like entering a comfortable yet beautifully appointed guet room; for the time being, it will give you all that you need.

* The Washington Times *

Billy Collins writes lovely poems—lovely in a way almost nobody's since Roethke's are. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

* John Updike *

Billy Collins, America's poet laureate, 'hits you between the eyes' with his 'twisted' take on everyday life.

* U.S. News & World Report *

I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours—smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm-voiced, easy to love.

* E. Annie Proulx *

In Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins shows how much a poet can accomplish with the lyric, a short line, and language clean and clear as bottled water.

* Times Union, Albany, NY *

Nobody else today writes quite like Collins, and few indeed write any better.

* X. J. Kennedy *

The easy swing of Collins's lines reflect his love of jazz and his ready response to beauty; the warmth of his voice emanates from his instinct for pleasure and his propensity toward humor. . . . Collins is jazzman and Buddhist, charmer and prince.

* Booklist *

These are wonderful poems and he's one of our best poets.

* American Poet