The title poem is 16 pages of maddeningly cute, but insubstantial, rambling wannabe-meditations about a piece of a rainbow. The faux characterization, written in an affected dialect, makes the tepid content even more intolerable. And so this collection trudges on and on ad nausium. His many pieces about painter Marc Chagall throughout the volume serve as examples of the book as a whole. Either Paulin uses the chance to weakly mask a polemic or work out issues of his own academic nightmare.
Illiteracy seems a better option than enduring a volume of such pompous meandering.
Paulin should stick with his career of writing criticism, editing anthologies, and teaching, instead of widening the gap between readers and poetry. Hugo Williams is at least pleasant light reading compared to Paulin. However, the poems in Billy's Rain , which chart the course of a failed love affair, lack style and substance. Meredith's century old Modern Love has more depth and surprise than this collection. As well, Billy's Rain seems like a weakling, a late-blooming cousin to W.D. Snodgrass' 1959 collection, Heart's Needle.