The Best Cigarette
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)"Nobody else today writes quite like Collins and few  indeed write any better." (X.J. Kennedy)"Billy Collins writes  lovely poems...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)"Graceful, ironic, smart." (William  Matthews)"Billy Collins is an American original" (Edward  Hirsch)"Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins  leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of  journey from the familiar or quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes  tender, often profound" (The New York Times11/30/97)"Wonderful! I  love Billy's 'music'" (Dr. Robert Coles)"Enchanting!" (Susan  Bergman)"Superb!" (Emmet Gowin)"A beautifully rendered  collection.  I can't ever recall ever laughing out loud so much while  listening to poems" (Dr. David Cramer)"No freshly encountered poet  since Frank O'Hara has given me, as a common reader, more unalloyed  pleasure." (Warner Berthoff,Boston Book Review)"One of the richest  imaginations around...the affectionate humor with which Mr. Collins  regards his surroundings amounts to a powerful kind of love, a  reverence of the moment" (The Washington Times)"this CD is  terrific...a great delight.  Billy was, needless to say, the greatest  sensation we've ever had at SGPF." (Rennie McQuilkin, Director, Sunken  Garden Poetry Festival)"Billy Collins is the essence of all that  is alive in contemporary poetry - innovative, humorous, versatile and  always aware, grounded in tradition and human experience, he grabs the  essence of his subject with vitality, caressing till it speaks to us." (Chris Buckley-Rohrer, KOPN, Missouri)"Unpretentious, funny and  good." (Ira Glass,This American Life)"The recording is  delightful, capturing Billy's wit and easygoing approach...To have  truly funny poetry is so refreshing.  This will make listeners very,  very happy." (Martha Wiseman, Northshire Books, VT)"We played it  while taking my 14-year-old to camp and were pleasantly surprised when  an hour or so after playing it, she wanted to hear it again." (Reagan  Upshaw)Billy Collins is a very funny guy, but while his voice (to  rip from its careful context one of his own lines) "sounds in places  very casual, very blue jeans", it embraces within the artful reach of  the poetic lines that carry it a great range of reading and  observation. Take the poem "Marginalia", in which we meet Duns Scotus  and James Baldwin, an egg-salad dripping, love-struck attendant of  Catcher in the Rye, and, most memorable to me, Irish monks in their  scriptoria, scribbling private notes in the margins of the gospels:  "anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting  than themselves." Be his subject poetry workshops or forgetfulness,  saxophones or cows, canceling a vacation or nursing a hangover, Collins  shapes his poems with a gentle but incisive humor that is ingratiating,  intelligent, and, quite often, inspired. In the nearly three dozen  poems he reads on this compact disc, the immediate genius of a stand-up  comic is joined to the slow intelligence--the layering of life and  learning--of an accomplished poet. He's been my companion on the best  car rides of the past few weeks, and I'll be listening to him again  tonight.  Highly recommended (The Common Reader) --Reviews--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.