Sailing Alone Around the Room

“Collins’s new greatest hits collection,
Sailing Alone Around the Room
, is certainly hospitable. There are brainy, observant, spit-shined moments on almost every page.… You finish [it] feeling pleased that such a sensible and gifted man is America’s poet laureate—young writers have plenty to learn from his clarity and apparent ease.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Collins uses ordinary words … and his sentences have the cadences of speech. They usually start with plain statements … then something strange happens. A rocket goes off, images burst out like fireworks, and life’s backyard becomes a magic kingdom.… Collins is often very funny—but more startling than the wit is the way his mind makes unexpected leaps and splices.”

—
The Boston Globe

“Collins’s new and selected poems shows how he attracts such a vast audience: by offering a pleasant tune sung in a pleasant way.… He is master of the everyday.… Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”

—
The Christian Science Monitor

“Like a master jazz trumpeter, Collins takes quirky, imaginative leaps that are as stunning for their coherence as their originality.… Collins’s popularity hinges on the accessibility of his poems and their mildly subversive quality. The vast majority are written in the first person, in the colloquial, richly perceptive tradition of William Carlos Williams.… So obviously a virtuoso, Billy Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“To begin with, Collins is absolutely charming. He deserves every rose he’s flung these days.… His poems are irresistible. Deceptively simple and gentle, they wrap their friendly arms around you, tell you a joke, pour you a drink and then usher you into a banquet of images and ideas.”

—Minneapolis
Star-Tribune

“[Collins] writes out … one of the major poetic scripts of our time: the one that finds transcendence in the ordinary, and sings hymns to the banal. The most obvious thing to say about Collins’s poetry is that it is funny, in an accessible and immediately familiar way. But his true poetic gift is something more than a sense of humor; it is a genuine, often debased, wit.… At its most powerful, this kind of wit is truly creative: if, as Emerson said, every word began life as a metaphor, wit resurrects the metaphor hiding in ordinary words.”

—
The New Republic

“Collins has reached into so many unexplored corners that he has elevated the mundane, not out of proportion to the world, but to a place where it seems to have always belonged.”

—
The Miami Herald

“Often, Collins will use the most mundane of subjects as a starting point for his work … but then he’ll take the poem to somewhere strange, marvelous and emotionally resonant.”

—
The Chicago Tribune

“Because he is so accessible, there is a tendency to underrate Collins, but there is an intellectual challenge to most of his work.”

—Cleveland
Plain Dealer

“[Collins’s] poetry insistently appeals to the mainstream. It brims with shared confidences, speaking softly and inviting the reader to come a little closer to the page. He does not write above or below his audience, but right at them. He engages us in intimate conversation.”

—
The Dallas Morning News

“The surface structure of these poems appears simplistic, but subtle changes in tone or gesture move the reader from the mundane to the sublime.… The results are accessible, but not trite, comical but not laughable, and well crafted but not overly flamboyant.… This volume belongs in every library.”

—
Library Journal

B
ILLY
C
OLLINS
is the author of six
collections of poetry, including
Sailing
Alone Around the Room; Questions About
Angels; The Art of Drowning;
and
Picnic
,
Lightning
, and is the editor of
Poetry
180: A Turning Back to Poetry
. He is a
Distinguished Professor of English at
Lehman College of the City
University of New York. He was
appointed Poet Laureate of the
United States for
2001–2003
.

2002 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright ©
2001
by Billy Collins

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in
2001
.

Poems from
Picnic, Lightning
, by Billy Collins, © 1998, are reprinted by
permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
The Art
of Drowning
, by Billy Collins, ©1995, are reprinted by permission of
the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
Questions About Angels
,
by Billy Collins, © 1991, are reprinted by permission of the University
of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
The Apple That Astonished Paris
, by Billy
Collins, are reprinted by permission of the University of Arkansas
Press. Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.

Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following
publications where some of these poems first appeared.

The Atlantic Monthly
, “The Iron Bridge,” “Man Listening to Disc,” “Snow
Day”;
Crab Orchard Review
, “Serenade”;
Field
, “Idiomatic,” “Scotland”;
Five Points
, “Pavilion”;
The Gettysburg Review
, “Insomnia,” “The Three
Wishes”;
The Paris Review
, “The Butterfly Effect”;
Pif
, “The Flight of the
Reader”;
Ploughshares
, “The Only Day in Existence,” “Tomes”;
Poetry
,
“Dharma,” “Jealousy,” “Madmen,” “November,” “Reading an Anthology
of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length
and Clarity of Their Titles,” “Sonnet”;
The Southern Review
, “The
Waitress”;
The Times Literary Supplement
, “Ignorance”

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Sailing alone around the room: new and selected poems / Billy Collins.
p.     cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43174-5
I. Title.
PS
3553.047478  S25  2000
811′.54—
DC
21              99-052861

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

v3.1

Katherine Collins (1901–1997)

William S. Collins (1901–1994)

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note to the Reader