A review by toniclark
Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins

3.0

I’m always so conflicted about Collins. I often like individual poems, but when I consider his body of work as a whole . . . I find it disappointing. Yes, some of his poems are amusing, or at least cute. A few even clever. Many are too fanciful to be taken seriously. Too many just fall flat. And he’s always writing (more or less) the same poem over and over. The poems feel formulaic, “humorous without actually being funny” (David Orr*) and too often self-congratulatory. As I wrote in my review of Horoscopes for the Dead, “Collins always seems to be caught up in a daydream, as if he has no particular work to do, place to go. He can idly muse about taking dead people (whose names he glimpses on headstones) for a ride on his copper-colored bicycle or make a sort of duck out of his hand and talk nonsense to it. There's no one listening, after all. Except we are. And sometimes I wish he actually had something more to say.”

See Orr’s review of Collins (not this collection) in The New York Times, January 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/books/review/08orr.html