The Art of Drowning

0822938936

The Art of Drowning is a book of poetry by the American Poet Laureate Billy Collins, first published in 1995. John Updike described the collection as "Lovely poems—lovely in a way almost nobody's since [Theodore] Roethke's are. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."[1] The title poem is the 11th poem in the collection, and it describes a man who reflects on the course of his life while he is drowning.

Contents

  • Dear Reader
  • Consolation
  • Osso Buco
  • Directions
  • Influence
  • Water Table
  • Reading in a Hammock
  • Print
  • Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales
  • Cheers
  • The Best Cigarette
  • Metropolis
  • Days
  • Tuesday, June
  • The Art of Drowning
  • Canada
  • The Biography of a Cloud
  • Death Beds
  • Conversion
  • Horizon
  • The City of Tomorrow
  • Thesaurus
  • Fiftieth Birthday Eve
  • On Turning Ten
  • Shadow
  • Workshop
  • Keats's Handwriting
  • Budapest
  • My Heart
  • Romanticism
  • Monday Morning
  • Dancing Toward Bethlehem
  • The First Dream
  • Sweet Talk
  • Dream
  • Man in Space
  • Philosophy
  • While Eating a Pear
  • The End of the World
  • Center
  • Design
  • The Invention of the Saxophone
  • Medium
  • Driving Myself to a Poetry Reading
  • Pinup
  • Piano Lessons
  • Exploring the Coast of Birdland
  • The Blues
  • Nightclub
  • Some Final Words

References

  1. ^ "BookDetails". www.upress.pitt.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-01.