Musical Tables

by Billy Collins Narrated by Billy Collins

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We cannot express enough of the joy that reading a Billy Collins poem gives us. Well, we can’t express it only because no one does the joy and wonder of existence in our daily routine better than Collins. He sets the bar high in taking the fewest words necessary to explode our hearts. A most minimal approach for a maximalism path to all the feels.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, and each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence

“Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.”-Billy Collins

You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the `fun'  back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.”

Now “America's favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love-all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins's recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.

3:00 AM

Only my hand
is asleep,
but it's a start.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Billy Collins embraces extreme compression in this collection of very short poems. Some of them are worthy of Henny Youngman; others are potentially heartbreaking if you pause the audiobook to think about them. Most of the poems are under 25 words. Even more than with most audio poetry collections, this one rewards the pause for reflection, since without it you are already into the next poem. Collins is a good narrator of his own work, and his afterword, in which he discusses why he wrote these poems and gives some examples of his favorite very short poems, illuminates the collection. The sheer number of poems also winds up giving us a portrait of the author’s interests and concerns at this stage of his life. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

The poetry of Billy Collins has a kindness that glitters with hard truth, and in Musical Tables he gives us a book of short, witty, often luminous snapshots of our sad and funny world.”—Paul Simon

“Collins’s short poems warm the soul. Like koans and haiku, these micro-lyrics roam a range of tone and feeling, from elegies to epiphanies to bone-dry witticisms. . . . His formal compression is deft; his insights, arresting.”—Oprah Daily

“Collins has said that the short poem is a sort of test for a poet: just as an artist should be able to draw a simple chicken, the poet should be able to channel meaning, emotion, profundity, and humor all through a couple of lines. Perhaps Collins is also aware of society’s rapidly diminishing attention span, but he has created an undaunting, readable book of poetry that will appeal to all ages and hit you where it hurts.”—LitHub

“Billy Collins, a former poet laureate of the United States, is a real gem. He’s a poet whose writing manages to be accessible, poignant and funny at the same time.”—The Palm Beach Post

Library Journal

07/01/2022

Amiable and gregarious, much-loved former U.S. Poet Laureate Collins takes a new tact in his latest collection, writing 125 short poems of a few lines each as he explores nature, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love.

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Billy Collins embraces extreme compression in this collection of very short poems. Some of them are worthy of Henny Youngman; others are potentially heartbreaking if you pause the audiobook to think about them. Most of the poems are under 25 words. Even more than with most audio poetry collections, this one rewards the pause for reflection, since without it you are already into the next poem. Collins is a good narrator of his own work, and his afterword, in which he discusses why he wrote these poems and gives some examples of his favorite very short poems, illuminates the collection. The sheer number of poems also winds up giving us a portrait of the author’s interests and concerns at this stage of his life. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178763681
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Musical Tables

No one knew what to do when the music stopped,
plus, the big tables were always in the way.

But soon it became the new game in spite of its pointlessness,
or was that the reason for its popular appeal? 



Highway

Hitchhiking alone,
I notice an ant walking in the opposite direction.



Aa

At school,
always seen together,
capital and small,
parent and child

holding hands,
about to cross the street in Alphabet City.



The Naked Eye

There was no eye lid to cover the naked eye

so she covered herself with some scenery,

a meadow she liked to look at when the other eye wasn’t looking.



Argument from Design

Six petals on each iris,
every other one with a small yellow streak,

which resembles a tiny vase,
holding a few flowers of its own.



New Calendar

The poem of next year—
every week a line,
every month a stanza,

and a tiny sun rising and setting in every numbered square.

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