Billy Collins

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 Roethke's are. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds …

Picnic, Lightning is a collection of poetry by Billy Collins, published in 1998. His fourth book of poetry, it was his first to be widely published and his last before election as United States Poet Laureate. The title poem is a reference to Humbert Humbert's mundane description of his mother's death as described by …