Book Review: Billy Collins's 'Horoscopes for the Dead'

Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems by Billy Collins

I love Billy Collins. He just plain says it. He doesn't reach for the heroic or the epic in the ordinary. The ordinary is enough. And he just plain says it. But when he does, he takes you to some unexpected place where things look very different from the ordinary.

As his poems unfold and we arrive at this other place, it’s extraordinary because we are right there with him--not below or behind or at a distance.

Collins is cool. Last semester, I showed some video adaptations of some of his poems--created with the poet's blessing--followed by his reading of without visuals. My students liked the best “To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old High School Girl" that he read without visuals. It's about a girl being loved for her completely ordinary self by her dad. She might not be Mozart, but she is who she is.

Horoscopes for the Dead is cool and ordinary and amazing. There is a poem thanking all those who died on the speaker's birthday for stepping aside, for making room for the speaker to live and grow. There is a poem about a guy taking in the names on the stones in a cemetery and teasing out the stories that emerge from names. There is a wife who is jealous of a manuscript.

We are who we are. There is poetry in noticing that. Life is extraordinary. Sign on to a volume of CollinS’s poetry, and he will show you how what you know, what we all know, is profoundly beautiful and loaded with possibilities.

From the poem “Grave”:
What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,

and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,

and the differences being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell one from another.

What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,

and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,

and the differences being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell one from another.

They make you look very scholarly,
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