The Rain in Portugal

Collins (Aimless Love) returns with 60 typically on-brand poems of wandering, observing, and experiencing brief moments of profundity. There are elements of darkness and political awareness (“the piece/ on the morning radio about the former asylum/ whose inmates were kept busy/ at wooden benches in a workshop/ making leather collars and wristbands/ that would later be used to restrain them”), but mostly there’s the Collins his devoted readership knows in poems such as “Not So Still Life,” wherein “With the skull inching toward the pear,/ and the cluster of eggs beginning to wander,/ I had to reassure myself/ that my mother and father were still alive,/ I had a place to stay/ and a couple thousand dollars in a savings account.” Collins’s allure has always been in short, talky poems that deal with poetry’s big subjects: life, death, and poetry (“Poetry is too busy thinking about her children/ as she replaces a gold button on the blazer of Pride”). Once again Collins delivers, musing about his students, taking a walk around a lake, and reflecting on music history: “see Keith standing/ on the shoulders of the other Rolling Stones,/ who are in turn standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,/ who, were it not for that endless stack of turtles.../ would find himself standing on nothing at all.” (Oct.)