If you like Collins' poetry, you'll like this collection. If he's a new auther to you, this is as good a place to start as any. ( )

This eighth collection by Billy Collins proves once again that poetry can be both intelligent and intelligible. Through his bestselling books and tenure as US Poet Laureate (2001-2003), Collins has blazed a difficult trail to win the reading public back to poetry. The poems he writes and advocates have the reader-friendly quality of "accessibility," much scorned in some academic circles today. Collins himself prefers to call such poetry "easy to enter," maintaining that poems may contain ambiguity and even mystery if only they will first allow the reader a starting point of understanding (i.e., plain English).
Whether in a domestic scene or travelogue, we are given the beckoning portal of universal experience: the pleasures of food, foibles, including those of poets; nature's healing balm; and the perennial striving of love to overcome our innate separateness. Themes light or grave are treated with charm, gentleness, and a sense of humor that is by turns sophisticated, childlike, and self abasing.
An excerpt from the poem "Despair" will sell the reader on Collins' irresistible variety of wit. After referring to "So much gloom and doubt in our poetry," the poet wonders what "the ancient Chinese poets/ would make of all this,/ these shadows and empty cupboards?" The poet's answer to his own question is a meditation containing an upbeat and comic resolve:

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

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

I went to the bookstore today -- not to buy anything, just to have a look around. I came away with my fourth copy of Mudbound, the new paperback, and I was surprised at the amber cover. I also got another novel and a collection of humorous travel stories.

Billy Collins' poetry makes me look at the ordinary, the every day, and see symmetrical beauty in the simple things of everyday life. I sailed through this new volume -- twice already -- and I am not the least bit disappointed.

His simple language, clever phrases, and delightful, humorous, and thought-provoking images give me more pleasure than any poetry I have ever read.

I needed this pick-me-up, because I finished teaching King Lear in class today, and the students were bored. I know they didn't read it. They could not see the power of the language, the depth of the characters, the intense fractured relationships.

They would declare the poems too simple and Hillary Jordan's Mudbound too long. They would miss the power of the language, the descriptions, the intense fractured society of Jim Crow Mississippi in 1945. They would be the poorer for it.

But I have another Billy Collins on my shelf, and I can take him and his words for a voyage to a wonderful place -- simple, quiet, reflective. Or I can hunker down with Laura, and Hap, and Ronsel on that mudbound farm in the Mississippi delta anytime I want.

Billy Collins has done it again. I am only going to tease you with a few stanzas from the first poem in the book, "August in Paris." The poet pauses to look over the shoulder of a sidewalk painter and wonders,

"But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?

Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together with a pin.

But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the tuning of a page" (3).

Now go get your own, because I am looking over Billy's shoulder, seeing the memories of my trips to Paris, stopping to watch a mime, a street performer, or a painter on a folding chair, delicately daubing paint on a small canvas. 5 stars.

--Jim, 3/20/09 ( )

I love Billy Collins and I love this book. It is funny, but also touching, and above all, so honest.

h, Billy Collins, the most popular modern poet laureate, the most amusing one. Here's a man who's not afraid to make jokes in verse, not afraid to be branded unserious. Thank goodness.

The first thing I noticed about Ballistics is how many of its poems are about the act of making poems and the life of the poet. Now, this is a pet peeve of mine. Why must so much verse be so very self-referential? Reading such stuff is like watching a DVD that's filled with making-of bonus features but contains no actual movie.

Therefore, I like Collins' other books better, especially Sailing Alone Around The Room. But there are good pieces here, poems that peek through the eyes of others and don't merely rely on Collins' (admittedly charming) quirk-schtick. And when he writes things like "love is just a matter / of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself / into the fire of someone else," I forgive him for quite a lot of navel-gazing.