Aimless Love collects over fifty new poems alongside a broad selection from Billy Collins’s previous four volumes, including Nine Horses and Horoscopes for the Dead. The collection centers on the quiet observations of suburban life, detailing the interior monologue of a speaker watching rain from a window, listening to jazz, or contemplating the history of an ordinary object like a matchstick. Collins utilizes a plain-spoken style to examine the relationship between the humor found in daily accidents and the looming presence of mortality.
Readers who value clarity and dry wit over dense abstraction will find these poems useful for grounding their own perceptions of the mundane. The book serves those who want to see how a simple observation about a dog or a cup of coffee can shift into a meditation on the passage of time. One finishes the collection with a sharper eye for the small ironies of life and a template for finding irony in the routine motions of a typical afternoon.
- Published
- 2013
- Language
- EN
