Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

Love Billy Collins! "On Turning Ten" is a wonderful poem

Billy Collins is amazing.

Oh I just love Billy Collins.

The First Dream The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight and as I lean against the door of sleep I begin to think about the first person to dream, how quiet he must have seemed the next morning as the others stood around the fire draped in the skins of animals talking to each other only in vowels, for this was long before the invention of consonants. He might have gone off by himself to...more

The First Dream The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight and as I lean against the door of sleep I begin to think about the first person to dream, how quiet he must have seemed the next morning as the others stood around the fire draped in the skins of animals talking to each other only in vowels, for this was long before the invention of consonants. He might have gone off by himself to sit on a rock and look into the mist of a lake as he tried to tell himself what had happened, how he had gone somewhere without going, how he had put his arms around the neck of a beast that the others could touch only after they had killed it with stones, how he felt its breath on his bare neck. Then again, the first dream could have come to a woman, though she would behave, I suppose, much the same way, moving off by herself to be alone near water, except that the curve of her young shoulders and the tilt of her downcast head would make her appear to be terribly alone, and if you were there to notice this, you might have gone down as the first person to ever fall in love with the sadness of another. Billy Collins i love this man. everything.   hide

ten stars

Amazing poetry-very inspirational. My favorite poem from this is: "Purity."

you can read the progression of billy collins in this book.

I absolutely loved this book. I've been only remotely aware of Billy Collins for a long time. When I stumbled across a video of him doing a reading on fora.tv I realized that he's probably my favorite living poet.

There is something wrong with you if you don't like this book. I've been reading and writing poetry for something like two decades, and few poets have moved me to such pleasure ... in laughter and sometimes simultaneous sorrow. His wit and observations are in the everyday transcendence of the everyday. Buy it. Read it. Love it.