The publication of Billy Collins' new and selected poems comes only about a month after his appointment as Poet Laureate of the U.S. for 2001-2002 and a little more than a decade since the publication of The Apple That Astonished Paris, the first of four books represented here along with 20 new and uncollected poems. It is easy to see some of the reasons for Collins' wide appeal: his self-deprecating charm, playful wit, inventive images, and his imaginative leaps — or wanderings, gracefully pivoting from the here-and-now to an alternate universe of the imagination.

There is the sense that the comfortable, knowable world of Dick and Jane, new-fallen snow, and a barking dog will soon transpose into something both unexpected and perfectly natural, reminding us that a poet is a visionary for whom reality vibrates with possibility.
 
The first poem in Sailing, with the wonderful title "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House," illustrates this strategy.

The neighbor's dog won't stop barking whenever they leave the house: "They must switch him on on their way out." Putting on a Beethoven symphony at full blast, he still cannot muffle the dog's constant barking. Then mid-way through the poem, Collins makes a turn:

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

Innocently, merely transcribing the reality around him, Collins follows where this may lead.

In "First Reader," he takes us back to a common cultural source for reading experiences, Dick and Jane, and considers the implications. Dick and Jane, who stand "politely on the wide pages," are potent with the changes that await their readers:

Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

He foresees all the other protagonists waiting beyond this neighborhood (Heathcliff, Pip, Nick Adams, Emma Bovary) while Dick and Jane appear frozen in time, always pointing and saying, "Look!"

But the alphabet's small and capital letters are waiting to be learned and the school children waiting to be transformed, just as the world grew out of the innocence of its first story of Eden: "Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,/ we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read."