Aimless Love

October 1, 2013
Collins, or the speaker in his poems, watches himself with helpless bemusement as he lives a life of continual self-expression, / jotting down little things. Obsessive noticing gets him into all sorts of trouble, as recounted so wryly, so tenderly in Aimless Love, the poem that gives this vital and shrewdly provocative volume its title and in which the speaker records his sequential ardor for a wren, a mouse, and a bar of soap. In selections from his four most recent collections, from Nine Horses (2002) to Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), and 51 glimmering new poems, former poet laureate and reader favorite Collins, the maestro of the running-brook line and the clever pivot, celebrates the resonance and absurdity of what might be called the poet's attention-surfeit disorder. He nimbly mixes the timelessthe sun, lonelinesswith the fidgety, digital now. Some poems are funny from the opening gambit to the closing flourish. But Collins' droll wit is often a diversionary tactic, so that when he strikes you with the hard edge of his darker visions, you reel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)