American Life in Poetry: Column 510 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Billy Collins, who lives in New York, is one of our country’s most admired poets, and this snapshot of a winter day is reminiscent of those great Chinese poems that on the virtue of their clarity and precision have survived for a couple of thousand years. His most recent book of poetry is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, (Random House, 2013). Winter A little heat in the iron radiator, the dog breathing at the foot of the bed, and the windows shut tight, encrusted with hexagons of frost. I can barely hear the geese complaining in the vast sky, flying over the living and the dead, schools and prisons, and the whitened fields. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2014 by Billy Collins, “Winter,” (Poetry East, No. 82, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Billy Collins and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introductions author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. ****************************** American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 23:13:55 +0000
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