James Byrne reviews Billy Collins's Nine Horses

James Byrne reviews Nine Horses by Billy Collins, from Picador at £7.99, a 120-page book. He begins with how he first met Collins's poems, in an old issue of Poetry London, and sketches a rapid rise that led from the popular collection Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes to a second term as American Poet Laureate. Byrne says he sought out the new book as soon as it was announced, curious whether Collins had found a fresh pitch or simply added another polished chapter.

His reading is mixed but fair. On the positive side, Byrne finds the familiar skill intact: Collins can lift domestic or ordinary subjects into something odd or sublime, and gives inanimate things new life. The title poem is his example, in which the poet describes a gift of a picture of nine horse heads and takes their sadness as a warning and a bond. He also observes a more compassionate tone than before, made possible by a willingness to be sentimental about darker material.

The criticisms are specific. Few poems step outside the first person, and the steady narrative manner becomes tiresome, so that he thinks the book at least twenty pages too long. That bias towards story, in his view, makes Collins resemble a frustrated novelist and dulls the Zen-like quality of earlier work. He still recommends it to anyone after a readable collection by a well-established poet, but personally will wait for the next one, and he speculates that a novel might be on the way. The review gives a candid sense of how Collins's later books were received in Britain.

Work

Nine Horses

Author

Billy Collins

Publisher

Picador

Nine Horses frequently displays a more compassionate tone

James Byrne, The Wolf, issue 3