Free Nine Horses by Billy Collins

P RAISE FOR
Nine Horses
AND B ILLY C OLLINS
    “A typical Collins poem has a self-illuminating quality to it, or … a gratifyingly organic feel about it, a sense that like some splendidly blooming plant, it develops naturally from even a most inauspicious instant of germination.…
Nine Horses
should only add to his rightful acclaim.”
    —The Boston Globe
    “Such a sensible and gifted man is America’s poet laureate—young writers have plenty to learn from his clarity and apparent ease.”
    —The New York Times Book Review
    “Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”
    —The Christian Science Monitor
    “So obviously a virtuoso, Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”
    —The Washington Post Book World
    “At once accessible and profound, [Collins’s] work makes him a natural people’s poet.”
    —Boston Herald
    “Using simple, understandable language, Collins captures ordinary life—its pleasures, its discontents, its moments of sadness and of joy.”
    —USA Today
    “[
Nine Horses
] should be placed next to Gideon’s Bible in every motel room in America. It should be required reading in order to get a driver’s license. It’s that essential, that accessible, that much fun.”
    —The Providence Journal
    “[Collins] writes out … one of the major poetic scripts of our time: the one that finds transcendence in the ordinary, and sings hymns to the banal. The most obvious thing to say about Collins’s poetry is that it is funny, in an accessible and immediately familiar way. But his true poetic gift is something more than a sense of humor; it is a genuine, often debased, wit.… At its most powerful, this kind of wit is truly creative: if, as Emerson said, every word began life as a metaphor, wit resurrects the metaphor hiding in ordinary words.”
    —The New Republic
    “[Collins’s] poetry insistently appeals to the mainstream. It brims with shared confidences, speaking softly and inviting the reader to come a little closer to the page. He does not write above or below his audience, but right at them. He engages us in intimate conversation.”
    —The Dallas Morning News

BILLY COLLINS is the author of six
    collections of poetry, including
Sailing
    Alone Around the Room; Questions About
    Angels; The Art of Drowning;
and
Picnic
,
    Lightning
, and is the editor of
Poetry
    180: A Turning Back to Poetry
. He is a
    Distinguished Professor of English at
    Lehman College of the City University
    of New York. He was appointed
    Poet Laureate of the United States
    for 2001–2003.

ALSO BY BILLY COLLINS
    Poetry 180
(editor)
    Sailing Alone Around the Room
    Picnic, Lightning
    The Best Cigarette
(CD)
    The Art of Drowning
    Questions About Angels
    The Apple That Astonished Paris
    Video Poems
    Pokerface



2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2002 by Billy Collins
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    Random House Trade Paperbacks and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
    This work was originally published in hardcover by
Random House, Inc., in 2002.
    Some of the poems which appear in this volume
first appeared in the following periodicals:
    The American Scholar:
“The Return of the Key”;
Barrow Street:
“Rooms”;
Boulevard:
“Paris”;
Brilliant Corners:
“Air Piano” (as “And His Sextet”);
Crazyhorse:
“As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse,” “Trompe L’Oeil”;
Cream City
Review:
“Istanbul,” “The Listener,” “The Literary Life”;
Crowd:
“Languor,”
“Roadside Flowers”;
Dominion Review:
“To My Patron”;
Double Take:
“The
Country,” “Obituaries”;
Field:
“The Great Walter Pater,”