Some poets are more-ish - the more of their poems you read, the more you want to read. Thus it is with the American poet Billy Collins. There’s a quiet, studied elegance to his poetry, and a wit that sneakily trips you up because you’ve forgotten to look for it, underpinned by an unobtrusive grasp of poetic technique. Though ‘bardic’ might be a more apposite description, since Collins is very much a public poet - in the past decade, he has held the posts of both US Poet Laureate and New York State Laureate, and his work does tend to reflect a certain brand of commissioned, reader-friendly poetry.

This new collection from Picador, BALLISTICS, opens with a typically whimsical, prefatory invocation of the reader in “August in Paris”. Here, the poet admires a painting over the shoulder of a Parisian artist; he then imagines glancing over his own shoulder to catch the reader observing the poet admiring the painting over the artist’s shoulder:

I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.

There’s a tongue-in-cheek, postmodernist tang to all this, compounded by the opening poem of the first section - the book is split into four sections - which is entitled “Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles” and begins thus: ‘What is there to say about them/that has not been said in the title?’ What indeed? Yet somehow the wily Collins manages not only to describe these ‘sleek racing sculls’ in greater detail, but goes on to envisage the rowers as the twelve apostles and himself as the cox, ‘calling time through a little megaphone’.

This trademark wit - always dry, laconic, understated, a touch surreal - is what has made Billy Collins a legend on the US poetry scene. These poems are written in a drawl (and perhaps intended to be read with one) but with a constantly heightened delivery that I’m convinced would be difficult for most other poets to sustain without flagging - or not without wishing he/she could shift register and become either lyrical or serious for a change.

Not that Collins does not write ‘serious’ poems; everything is covered here that you might expect from a major US poet: love, death, divorce, “The Great American Poem”, “Pornography”, and even Philip Larkin, another famously laconic poet, who gets a walk-on part ‘in an undertaker’s coat’. Nonetheless, Collins never quite shakes off his innate desire to mock. Luckily for the reader, Billy Collins’ forté happens to be whimsy and sustained self-deprecation, and so his poems work marvellously well. Vive le rire!

Collins himself has few worries about his poetic direction. ‘So much gloom and doubt in our poetry’ may be the opening lament of his poem “Despair”, but Collins swiftly turns for guidance to those ‘ancient Chinese poets’

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.

Is it all about laughter? No indeed, for there are elegies here, albeit unconventional ones. One rather lovely poem, “The Day Lassie Died” - Collins has a talent for transparent, memorable titles - makes Lassie, pictured on the front of the Sentinel, sound more like a cross between a supermodel and the Mona Lisa than a collie dog - ‘there’s her face, the dark eyes,/the long near-smile, and the flowing golden coat’. At this point, the poem looks and smells like satire. Yet nostalgia and sentiment drip from his lines in equal measure: ‘and I’m leaning on the barn door back home/while my own collie, who looks a lot like her/lies curled outside in a sunny patch’.

One reason why the tone of individual poems is so hard to pin down may be found in Collins’ restless, mercurial mind. It’s not that he can’t commit to a single idea, but that his mind makes unexpected connections between them. His poem “Lost”, for instance, begins with an ordinary lost coin - in the manner of these tiresome workshop poems about items you might find in your pocket - and turns into a poem about the Roman poet, Ovid, who was ‘forever out of favour with Augustus’. Of course, the traditional head stamped on a coin provides a path from one to the other - ‘the profile/of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other’ - but there does seem to be a coin-toss pattern in his poems, beginning with one face and ending with another.

The key motive for buying a volume of Billy Collins’ poetry, however, remains his wit. Deeply irreverent and satirical, yet never offensive, it serves the middle way of covertly political writing and so endears itself to a broad swathe of readers, whether they buy contemporary poetry regularly or not. It also states in plain terms what other poets might shrink from, presumably for fear of not being ‘poetical’ enough. For only Billy Collins, in an otherwise erudite and poker-faced poem on “Greek and Roman Statuary” could point out with such unholy glee how beautifully sculptured arms, legs, penis and other accoutrements may have broken off over millennia, but

the mighty stone ass endures,
so smooth and fundamental, no one
hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.

Whether drunkenly confiding in a Parisian canine over ‘the intolerable poetry of my compatriots’ or assuming the insignificant part of ‘an ant inside a blue bowl/on the table of a cruel prince’, Billy Collins demonstrates that, like Noel Coward, he has ‘a talent to amuse’. Indeed, the title poem of this collection, “Ballistics”, show him at his most scurrilous; it describes a high-speed photograph of a bullet shooting through a book, with the incorrigible Collins eventually deciding this was a collection of poems ‘by someone of whom I was not fond/and that the bullet must have passed through/his writing with little resistance.’ All of which only endears Billy Collins to me further; ‘light’ his verse may be – simple it is not.

© Jane Holland

Billy Collins, Ballistics, Picador, 2009. £8.99. ISBN 978 0 330 46438 3

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.