Whale Day: And Other Poems

by Billy Collins Narrated by Billy Collins

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

What if Penn & Teller were poets instead of magicians? They approach their craft seriously but present it with humor. They present the wonder of the world by telling you they are going to pull a rabbit out of a hat—and yet, we're still surprised when they do. The poems in Whale Day display this same kind of magic—simple language arranged creatively. Billy Collins' sleight of hand isn't there to trick us into reading poetry, instead, it's to remind us of the beauty of living.

A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal
 
“The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday.”-The Wall Street Journal

Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country's most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins's reputation as one of America's most interesting and durable poets.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Billy Collins may be the most popular poet working in America today, and this audio edition of his latest collection is a good demonstration of why that is so. In both speaking and writing, his voice is intimate and conversational, never declamatory, inviting us into the poems. The poems cover a wide range of subjects, although aging and death come up repeatedly, which is not surprising for someone who has retired to Florida (according to a few of the poems). But he is still actively engaging with the world in his work and making gentle fun of almost all of it, including himself. His tone in writing and speaking is often bemused, letting us get the surface first, then the genuine depths of his mature poetry. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Library Journal

08/28/2020

In his 13th collection, former U.S. Poet Laureate Collins presents poems that strike a balance between fact and fiction, description and whimsy. Travel, friendship, love, and walking an aged dog are all topics here, but a significant number focus on mortality—whether the poet's own or that of friends and relatives. Their tone is often light, but beneath the humor is a quest to understand what happens before dying and after; one riffs on cremains, opining that "Scattering is the option du jour." At heart, Collins is a storyteller, as showcased in "Downpour," whose speaker writes the names of recently deceased friends on the back of a shopping list. Leaving the supermarket, he suddenly realizes he forgot Terry O'Shea and the bananas and bread: "And that is when I set out,/ …walking as if in a procession honoring the dead." Some poems miss the mark, as in a poem that quotes Cézanne's wonderful observation that "a single carrot,/ if painted in a completely fresh way,/ would be enough to set off a revolution" but too predictably leaps to Bugs Bunny and Beatrix Potter. Yet the best poems offer moments of sheer magic that take readers to places never imagined. VERDICT Not Collins's best collection but a solid one that all libraries will want for its emotional resonance during difficult times.—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Billy Collins may be the most popular poet working in America today, and this audio edition of his latest collection is a good demonstration of why that is so. In both speaking and writing, his voice is intimate and conversational, never declamatory, inviting us into the poems. The poems cover a wide range of subjects, although aging and death come up repeatedly, which is not surprising for someone who has retired to Florida (according to a few of the poems). But he is still actively engaging with the world in his work and making gentle fun of almost all of it, including himself. His tone in writing and speaking is often bemused, letting us get the surface first, then the genuine depths of his mature poetry. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177792682
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One

Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog

She’s painfully slow,

so I often have to stop and wait

while she examines some roadside weeds

as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.

And she’s not a pretty sight anymore,

dragging one of her hind legs,

her coat too matted to brush or comb,

and a snout white as a marshmallow.

We usually walk down a disused road

that runs along the edge of a lake,

whose surface trembles in a high wind

and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.

We don’t walk very far before

she sits down on her worn haunches

and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.

Then it’s time to carry her back to the car.

Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,

I realize I should tell you

she’s not really seventy-five. She’s fourteen.

I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense

of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.

I mean who really cares about another person’s dog?

Everything else I’ve said is true,

except the part about her being fourteen.

I mean she’s old, but not that old,

and it’s not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.



Contemporary Americans

I was trying to make my way

across a busy street in San Francisco,

while carrying the new anthology of poetry

I’d been flipping through earlier that morning—

with my pot of tea and two pieces of cinnamon toast—

in which I was wedged between James Tate and Bob Dylan

because the poets were arranged old to young, according to age.

I had to avoid a couple of cars,

cross over two sets of trolley tracks,

and dodge a guy with a ski cap on a bicycle

in order to get across the street and enter

one of the city’s many hospitable parks

with their hedges, benches, and shade trees

and often girls on a blanket, a juggler, an old man doing tai-chi.

And that’s where I lay down on the soft grass,

closed my eyes, and after a little while

began to picture the three of us lined up in a row

according to the editor’s wishes,

sliding out of our mothers in order, one after the other,

then ending up pressed together on a shelf

in a corner bookstore, yodeling away in the dark.



Paris in May

A teddy bear in a store window,

three housepainters

waiting to cross a boulevard,

a woman in a café, her red nails

on a man’s nape while she smokes—

what are we to make of all this?

In the church of Saint-Sulpice,

the Virgin holds her baby to her chest

as she stands on the round earth,

appearing to be unaware

of the serpent she is crushing with one foot.

Outside, four stone lions guard a fountain.

Is this a puzzle I am meant to solve

before the evening bells ring again—

here a man wearing a newspaper hat,

there a child alone on a flowery balcony?

An outdoor table on Rue Cassette

seemed a good enough place to sort things out.

And sure enough,

after two milky-green glasses of Pernod,

the crowd flowed around me like a breeze,

and I found a link between my notebook

and the soft Parisian sky,

both being almost the same pale shade of blue.

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