Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

Description

Aimless Love is Billy Collins' first new compilation of poems in twelve years, and a wonderful successor to his first, the bestselling Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes. Aimless Love presents more than fifty new poems together with generous selections from his four most recent books. No poet writing today communicates so directly and effectively, and no living poet has managed to both enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and expand it so dramatically: his poems appeal to readers and live audiences across the globe, and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic and serious, Collins's poetry unearths the wonder in the everyday: in his own words, his poems `begin in Kansas and end in Oz'. Weaving the themes of love, loss, joy and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this `poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace'.

Billy Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Lehman College, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001 to 2003, and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.

The treat of treats. Unlike the wedding guest waylaid by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the reader emerges from encounters with Collins as a wiser and far happier person. -- Geoff Dyer, Books of the Year * New Statesman * This collection of new and selected poetry is a perfect introduction for the reader . . . a wry, understated often dark humour emerges * Belfast Telegraph *