The Rain in Portugal: Poems

Billy Collins

Random House Publishing Group, Oct 4, 2016 - Poetry - 128 pages

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him “America’s favorite poet.”
 
The Rain in Portugal—a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer—sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical—“the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis”—to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.
 
Praise for The Rain in Portugal
 
“Nothing in Billy Collins’s twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that’s the charm of this collection.”—The Washington Post
 
“This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin.”—Library Journal
 
“Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid.”—Booklist

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rmagahiz - LibraryThing

This is another collection of somewhat lightweight verse, sometimes with a characteristic little turn in the last stanza veering off into some unexpected direction. It isn't the kind of poetry that ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - dmturner - LibraryThing

I like Billy Collins even though his poems' last lines often take a vague right turn and bicycle into a parking lot. People who liked their humor and clarity used to suggest I teach his poems to my ...

Contents

• The Night of the Fallen Limb: 9
• Cosmology: 16
• The Money Note: 22
• The Bard in Flight: 29

About the author

Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Rain in Portugal: Poems
• Author: Billy Collins
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2016
• ISBN: 0399588302, 9780399588303
• Length: 128 pages
• Subjects: Humor / Form / Limericks & Verse; Poetry / American / General; Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Nature