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Ron Padgett is every bit the off -hand and fresh-phrasing poet Billy Collins wants to be, and it’s his particular genius to write in such a way that he hears what is truly and spontaneously poetic in actual speech and yet has the sense to contain the vernacular with real cadence and rhythm. Though he is eager to avoid the idea of being the Poet/Priest officiating over the mundane life oracle-like in his verse depositions of the everyday and the noticed and familiar, Collins seems The Professional all the same, and not in a way I intend as complimentary. Admirable though it is that he seeks to be remained approachable to a reader with only a glancing interest in poetry, his poems are too neat, orderly, the illogic that ought to be at work behind the machinery of language operating much too logically as they arrive at those last stanzas, last lines, and concluding images that are supposed to make you gasp so slightly, close your eyes and wonder how it was the poem started with a man getting his mail or paying a bill and winding up in some other part of the world playing jazz records and reading airport novels.
Collins delivers,, he makes you laugh, cry, coo and ooh on schedule: in another existence I think he might have been the local human-interest columnist for a hometown newspaper, cleverly discussing characters community and bits of home life three times a week, one thousand words a column, clever, effective…
