Musical Tables by Billy Collins
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION WINTER 2023 belonging There’s an underlying sense of

There’s an underlying sense of ‘exile’ which permeates the whole collection and a quality of empathy with suffering

these are poems for our changing times

The ‘Acts of Oblivion’ were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions

supermarket shopping and the major adventures of sharpening a pencil and chopping carrots

Some of these poems offer miraculously vivid excavations of such everyday objects as the humble scatter cushion

Musical Tables by Billy Collins<br><b>POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION WINTER 2023</b> belonging There’s an underlying sense of"I've grown old now my own namerings a bell." In each of the short poems in Billy Collins's Musical Tables, the former United States Poet Laureate tempers his characteristically jocular voice with what he calls the "thrill of mortality" flashes of profundity amongst the mundane, startling reminders of the wonder of being alive. Through the brevity of these poems, Collins' knack for coaxing the poetry out of the everyday becomes ever more refined.