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A review by brice_mo
Water, Water: Poems by Billy Collins
5.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC!
Billy Collins’s Water, Water is a well-worn sweater of a poetry collection, offering comfort in its unadorned warm-heartedness.
The collection is decidedly unambitious, which gradually begins to feel like its own kind of ambition. These poems celebrate poetry through its limitations, affectionately referencing great poets while seeming to suggest that the best thing someone could do is put down the book, go for a walk, and call a loved one. Each line exists to remind the reader that a line can only go so far. While it sounds like this could be treacly, it’s not. Every turn is like rounding the corner and bumping into a friend you haven’t seen in a while—nothing is as pleasantly surprising as familiarity.
Collins uses excitedly grounded language, eschewing abstractions that might make poems inaccessible. Across the book, there are moments of clarifying, elemental crisis, such as fires and floods, but even these serve as a form of catharsis, suggesting that one’s important memories and relationships would emerge stronger. The poet notes, fairly directly, the way that sharing an event transforms it into something meaningful, and this could be viewed as the poetics of the book as a whole—these pieces become poems because they are meant to be experienced together, and the resulting warmth is so invitational that it makes the collection feel distinctive in its appeal towards universality.
It feels appropriate that the collection’s title is a reference to something so essential for life—Water, Water—because Collins constantly leads readers to the essence of what a privilege it is to be alive. I can't think of a more worthwhile subject for a book.
Billy Collins’s Water, Water is a well-worn sweater of a poetry collection, offering comfort in its unadorned warm-heartedness.
The collection is decidedly unambitious, which gradually begins to feel like its own kind of ambition. These poems celebrate poetry through its limitations, affectionately referencing great poets while seeming to suggest that the best thing someone could do is put down the book, go for a walk, and call a loved one. Each line exists to remind the reader that a line can only go so far. While it sounds like this could be treacly, it’s not. Every turn is like rounding the corner and bumping into a friend you haven’t seen in a while—nothing is as pleasantly surprising as familiarity.
Collins uses excitedly grounded language, eschewing abstractions that might make poems inaccessible. Across the book, there are moments of clarifying, elemental crisis, such as fires and floods, but even these serve as a form of catharsis, suggesting that one’s important memories and relationships would emerge stronger. The poet notes, fairly directly, the way that sharing an event transforms it into something meaningful, and this could be viewed as the poetics of the book as a whole—these pieces become poems because they are meant to be experienced together, and the resulting warmth is so invitational that it makes the collection feel distinctive in its appeal towards universality.
It feels appropriate that the collection’s title is a reference to something so essential for life—Water, Water—because Collins constantly leads readers to the essence of what a privilege it is to be alive. I can't think of a more worthwhile subject for a book.