The Art of Drowning explained
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
Notes and References
- Web site: BookDetails . www.upress.pitt.edu . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20060901111652/http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=34383 . 2006-09-01.
