Water, Water

 

Billy Collins' collection of poetry Water, Water is 91 pages long. It was the book cover that initially intrigued me, depicting a rabbit racing across a meadow.

I highlighted some of the poems that I found particularly engaging.

Magical Realism

BC/AD

Turning the Pages of A History of Art the Morning After an Argument

Emily Dickinson in Space

Eden

Display Case

Zero Grannies

Margins

Reading the Guest Book

MARGINS

I cannot thank you enough

so I will thank you insufficiently,

for the book full of reproductions

of the whimsical drawings found

in the margins of medieval manuscripts,

which you gave me the last time we met for ice cream.

I love turning the colorful pages

and seeing the tiny scribal adornments,

especially of animals still around today ––

the robin, the frog, the spoonbill, and the hen,

not to mention the goose, the fox, and the partridge,

all surviving in our meadows, swamps, and barnyards.

I also enjoyed the half-boy blowing a horn

and the four monks rowing a rowboat,

but I would really like to meet the guy

who distracted himself one morning

early in the thirteenth century

from the arduous job of copying the Alphonso Psalter

by drawing a monkey doing a handstand

on the back of a comely mermaid

as she is offering a breast to a nursing baby.

I'd like to buy that man a few flagons

and a slice of venison to chew on

as we got to know one another in his favorite pub.

He would introduce me to his friends,

a ploughman, a merchant, and a wayward prioress,

and I would refrain from telling him

about motion pictures and moon landings.

After a while, light would leave the windows

and the ruddy publican would call the time.

Then outside under the sign, as we said goodbye

I would add "But in the end, of course,

life is not all hand-stand monkeys

and comely nursing mermaids."

"It isn't?!" he would shoot back with a booming laugh,

which would leave me nonplussed as I walked back.

past printing presses, guillontines, microscopes,

locomotives, radios, and ice cream parlors,

all the way up to the encircling arms of the present.

My mind can visually picture the manuscript drawings and the meeting between the two gentlemen. It would have been so hard to keep future events a secret. In the last stanza, the poet wraps up the poem beautifully as he journeys back to the present.

My style was definitely not reflected in some of the poems in the book, but I think everyone can find that in any collection of poems. I think Collins' poems capture life's paradoxes and everyday experiences. He captures both common and quite unusual events in his poems, such as children learning their ABCs and an astronaut reading Emily Dickinson in space. Water, Water is a book I enjoyed reading and I am sure you will as well.