Poetry too self-conscious for its own good

I feel less like a reviewer than like a ventriloquist whose doll has learned to speak: in Billy Collins' new collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Collins has conveniently included his own adulatory book review, disguised in verse and interspersed throughout his pages.

COURTESY RANDOM HOUSE Well, I guess that's one thing you could do alone in a room.

This volume contains selected poems from most of Collins' previous works, along with 20 new poems. The book's conceit is that the author sets forth a clear thesis followed by well-thought out points about why his poetry is such a pleasure to read.

"I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title," starts off "Workshop," which then proceeds to spend each stanza describing the stanza itself. A description of "that last stanza, my favorite," ends the poem.

Collins' work in this volume concerns itself not only with the thinking about and writing of his own work, but also with the reader's reaction, which he tries to control with more of a child's whiny "Come ahhhhh-n!" than with evocative language that would presumably make any manipulation of the reader's opinion wholly unnecessary.

Despite these disrupting reminding us that what we're reading is indeed poetry, Collins' sense for detail is consonant with a contemporary sentiment that finds art in the everyday. And Collins finds it every day.

In a four-page poem from Picnic, Lightning (1998) about a Victoria's Secret catalog, for example, he reads the minds of eight models: "Go ahead, fling it into the fireplace," one's "distinctly challenging expression" appears to say—"we're all going to hell anyway."

This poem's inventory of lingerie styles shows Collins at his best and worst. Following in the well-trodden footsteps of Marianne Moore during the Modernist movement, Collins feels quite comfortable injecting anything into a poem. What he ignores, however, is the possibility that breaking up the description of a velvet body suit into ordered lines of verse does not constitute a poem any more than a list of exotic catalog colors does.

There is no doubt, however, that Collins eagerly welcomes the reader into his life. After reading several poems, one could probably map out the poet's library, his daily schedule, even the exact position of his bed. Everything in Collins' warm and cozy coffee mug world fits together, warm and comfortable and never oppressive.

This is a book, then, to be perused only at bedtime. Collins' insights into the human condition will only reassure the reader's hopeful ideas about how life works, and the dark moments dissipate faster than those in a sitcom.

Each page of Collins' book so adamantly clings to "a clean surface in the middle of a clean world," as the poet describes the desk in "Advice to Writers," that one begins to wonder if the Candide of these fables has ever actually left his house.

But Collins does not suffer from agoraphobia; he writes of taking a walk and, forgetting the words he wanted to copy down (calling the resulting poem an "elegy"), he imagines all the waiters and waitresses who have ever served him gathering in an amphitheater, and he describes the feeling of walking down the street listening to a Discman.

There is much about Collins' life as described in these poems that may seem wonderfully familiar, not because casual and carefree happiness is the norm, but because many of these poems could narrate Hollywood movies about life in the suburbs.

Most of the poems read like journal entries of someone who knows he will be published. His generosity with metaphors feels the same way, in that a stanza may be accompanied by several others that offer various comparisons; "the bell is the world" or maybe "I am the heavy bell," or could it be that "you are the bell"? No one's quite sure.

In this poem, "Japan," where the bell is part of a haiku that Collins has been reciting as he walks around the house, one confronts the ultimate egomaniac of this volume. The house is empty except for the dog, in front of whom Collins kneels down and recites the haiku twice—once for "each of his long white ears."

"I listen to myself saying it," Collins explains, and the reader is invited not just to listen to the sound of the poem, but also to Collins congratulating himself with each line.

As with many of the poems in Sailing Alone Around the Room, we end up reading the poet's reading of himself. This may be nothing more or less than human instinct, but perhaps these instincts might better be used at the hairdresser or with the in-laws.

Back to A&E...