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This digital document, covering the life and work of Billy Collins, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1143 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

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"A trove of well-wrought, luminous, soul-bracing gifts." -Thomas Lynch (on the 2010 edition)

With selection chosen from a vast range of journals and magazines, The Best Spiritual Writing 2011 gathers the finest pieces of spiritual writing to appear in American publications during the past year. The collection offers an opportunity to read intimate and thought-provoking work, ranging from poetry to short fiction to memoir to essay, by some of the nation's most esteemed writers, including Rick Bass, Philip Yancey, Terry Teachout, Robert D. Kaplan, and many others. As Phyllis Tickle said of last year's edition, "there is enough here to feed the hungry heart for years to come." ... Read more

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Tom Thomson In Purgatory is a collection of poetry from the creator of "Tom Thomson", a literary character whom former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins claims to be "a verbal phantom, the result of the poet's word-spinning, but at the same time we lean forward to believe in him--our hero for the moment, a man of the hour..." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Jolly More
I heard Mr. Jollimore read in Berkeley, CA not long ago, and I found his poetry very, very pleasing.He has a deadpan delivery that goes well with his wry poems.I don't always get the references, but I do get the humor, which is what I think he would prefer.His poems all have great flow and vivid imagery. They remind me of John Berryman, but, obviously, I'm not the first person to make that connection.But, where Berryman's poems were just a little creepy, Jollimore's are more surreal.It's a great collection.

on the lam in limbo
the real life tom thomson was one of canada's greatest artists who died, story has it, under mysterious circumstances, drowning in algonquin park's canoe lake in 1917. a story of which jollimore is most familiar.

tom thomson makes his appearance in the first section of jollimore's collection, entitled: from the boy scout manual, a selection of poems pondering the elemental nature of the earth and universe thru first perceptions of transformations as seen by a boy in the poem, glass:

'what a surprise
to see that things end, that things are transformed
into other things...it must have been so much
for a child to grasp.and what of water,
which looks like glass but does not shatter?
and what of air? and what of the soul?
are we glass or are we water? and where
does the child go who wants this answered?'

and by ovid, and the presocratic philosophers, though the philosophers are shunned when the boy becomes a man in trout quintet:

'the philosopher thales devised a method
of measuring tom thomson by taking the length
of his shadow at the moment when a normal man's shadow
was as long as the man was tall.

tom thomson snorts at philosophers.'

and in trout quintet looms large as folk tale hero who when interviewed is deferential of the legendary exploits that spring up around him:

four men could stand in tom thomson's shadow,
smoking cigars and talking about baseball.

one night four men came for him
carrying guidebooks and sawed-off shotguns.
a week later their chevy suburban was found.
the motor was running.the left turn indicator blinking.
the glove was filled with trout.'

this is the territory of ernest hemingway's short stories.thesecond section of the book, entitled: tom thomson in purgatory, has tom hiding out, one of the poems even entitled tom thomson hiding out, going to his uneventful job every day and returning to his apartment at day's end. the poems describing his purgatory are 44 sonnets influenced by jollimore's 'co-conspirator', john berryman, particularly his dream songs wherein berryman follows henry on his travels, switching noun verb agreement and giving grammar a good slouch, 2 strategies employed by jollimore:

'time goes on. and ashamed he is to say
how time goes on. as if it might be paused
if only he the password had. ...'

Digging for treasure...
There is no question that critics are correct in saying that Troy Jollimore is the next great American poet... but let's just remember that he is Canadian. I think it important that every once in a while Canadians make that claim on him, lest it be forgotten...

There is a decidedly Canadian feel - at least to this Canadian - to his poems of the fictitious Tom Thomson. To see the inner life of Tom is to see an honesty and depth lacking in most poetry and absent in most fiction. The poetry involving Tom Thomson is a character study of unnerving depth which fascinates and draws the reader in to the truth of Tom.

While I enjoy the titular Tom Thomson series of poems, it is the many other works here which move me the most... especially "Height of my Powers" which, in its simplicity and simple setting reveals the strength of love and the little things: The simple dress/ that you say looks like an apron, that I won't/ admit how much I adore, because/ I don't want you to stop wearing it.

What bibliophile can resist "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Ruined by Reading the Cantos of Ezra Pound: Or, Song of my Shelf" with its constant use of book titles and literary reference (and of course that great film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) and quiet denouement: Little friend, little friend,/ fall on your knees./ Let it come down./ Call it sleep.

Of course, connecting back to my rural Canadian upbringing I can't help but love "From the Boy Scout Manual". Not how I remember Boy Scouts...but I think I like Troy's version better: If gold, jewels or currency/ are turned up during the process, they/ belong to the scout who owns the shovel.

In reading Troy Jollimore's Tom Thomson in Purgatory, happily, you are that scout...

Deftly adroit at writing both free verse and prose poetry.
An academician who currently serves on the faculty of California State University, Canadian poet Troy Jollimore is deftly adroit at writing both free verse and prose poetry. "Tom Thomson In Purgatory" is a compilation of his best work and proved to be the 2005 winner of the Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award. Imaginative, lyrical, compelling, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and highly recommended reading, here is a body of work that will well serve to demonstrate and document Troy Jollimore as one of the best of his generation. `After': If we must speak of each other, let it be/in the forms that monarchs and generals use/to refer to their rivals; as if each were known/to the other only through field reports/and classified intelligences. Let it be/in tones of wariness, grudging respect, and,/where permitted, mutual admiration./Let our campaign be conducted on these terms.//And if people speak of the `break-up,'/let us hear in that the cold overtones/of the word as applied to a glacier: how,/new light found an entry, and the gleaming designs,/a kaleidoscope view-a lens through which/itself to be seen-as the fragments, mindless/and pure, frigid yet free, plunged/to the sea, that vast, that resolute,/that insensate, that insatiable sea.

people form strange patterns
Near the center of Troy Jollimore's book come the following lines: "and people form strange patterns, fields, as if / a magnet he, and iron filings they."The people in this book, particularly the protagonist, form strange and compelling patterns.When we first glimpse Tom Thomson he's fishing and playing solitaire: "Each time he loses, / he throws his cards into the water. / Each time he wins / he catches a trout."

The relationship between the characters and the world they inhabit is quirky--sometimes charming, sometimes sad, sometimes extremely funny.It's always complicated, and not in the conventional ways that poems often throw their readers.In Jollimore's poems we always know exactly what has happened in the literal sense.We can picture it, summarize a plot, name the main characters, and even tell some choice stories about them. Yet something important remains mysterious, inexplicable, impossible to pinpoint. The mystery (and the relentless variation in the long sonnet series) keeps you reading.

Along the way, you acquire some questions:
"And what of water, / which looks like glass but does not shatter? / And what of air? And what of the soul? / Are we glass or are we water?And where / does the child go who wants this answered?"

And you learn a plethora of reasons why Tom Thomson likes a place:
"because the satellites cannot see it" and because the trout come and stop there, because parsley and wild tomatoes grow on the banks, and because of the way "his canoe fits the water" and "the water fits the earth."

And you even get an invitation to slough off your own identity for a bit (in "How to Get There"):

When you reach the village
(the cluster of white houses)
stop and discard the map.
Also get rid of the passengers.
From here on they'd only weigh you down.
Leave them by the side of the road.You'll need
a new identity.Call yourself `Gary.'
Say that you're in `insurance.'

My advice is to call yourself Gary, take the detour, and spend some time in Jollimore's beautiful and strangely patterned world. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by Thomson Gale on September 25, 2006. The length of the article is 464 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Poet tells freshmen to scribble, not Hi-Lite.(Higher Education)(Billy Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate, delivers the UO's convocation speech)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) (Newspaper)
Date: September 25, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: C1

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Collection of POETRY Magazine issues all featuring Billy Collins.Please see listing for more information. ... Read more

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Kapitel: Eric Wolf, Billy Collins, Raymond Smullyan, Linda Keen, John Corigliano, Joseph W. Dauben, Martin Duberman, Stanley Cowell. Aus Wikipedia. Nicht dargestellt. Auszug: Raymond Merrill Smullyan (born May 25, 1919) is an American mathematician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist philosopher, and magician. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career (like Persi Diaconis a generation later) was stage magic. He then earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied under Alonzo Church. While a Ph.D. student, Smullyan published a paper in the 1957 Journal of Symbolic Logic showing that Gödelian incompleteness held for formal systems considerably more elementary than that of Gödel's 1931 landmark paper. The contemporary understanding of Gödel's theorem dates from this paper. Smullyan later made a compelling case that much of the fascination with Gödel's theorem should be directed at Tarski's theorem, which is much easier to prove and equally disturbing philosophically. The culmination of Smullyan's lifelong reflection on the classic limitative theorems of mathematical logic is his quite readable: Smullyan is the author of many books on recreational mathematics, recreational logic, etc. Most notably, one is titled What Is the Name of This Book?. Many of his logic problems are extensions of classic puzzles. Knights and Knaves involves knights (who always tell the truth) and knaves (who always lie). This is based on a story of two doors and two guards, one who lies and one who doesn't. One door leads to heaven and one to hell, and the puzzle is to find out which door leads to heaven by asking one of the guards a question. One way to do this is to ask "Which door would the other guard say leads to hell?". This idea was famously used in the 1986 film Labyrinth. In more complex puzzles, he introduces characters who may lie or tell the...http://booksllc.net/?l=de ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by Thomson Gale on September 21, 2006. The length of the article is 1208 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: EASY DOES THE POET.(Arts & Literature)(Ex-poet laureate Billy Collins is a booster for verse any reader might understand)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) (Newspaper)
Date: September 21, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: B1

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry features 300 poems by 94 of America's best poets, including Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Denise Duhamel,Tony Hoagland, Li-Young Lee, Jane Kenyon, Philip Levine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Larry Levis, William Matthews, Jo McDougall, Gerald Stern, Jean Valentine, and Dean Young. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A major offering that is sure to delight
This is a wonderful collection of poetry that would be ideal for someone wanting to sample poetry or perhaps give as a gift. There is something in the 300 plus poems by 94 of America's best poets that will appeal to virtually any reader remotely interested in poetry. The reader can sample the works of both well known poets like Philip Levine, Ruth L. Schwartz, and Billy Collins as well as lesser known but highly regarded one's such as Tracy K. Smith, Nick Flynn, and Joy Katz. The subjects addressed run the gambit from love, desire, death, and family relationships to a host of other offerings that make this a literal poetry feast of some of the best of the best in contemporary American poetry. A major offering that is sure to delight. ... Read more

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Selections from the Scholastic Art & Writing awards. ... Read more

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Includes essays on poetry of Billy Collins, David Kirby and Tony Gloeggler.Published twice yearly. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on June 1, 1999. The length of the article is 722 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: READING AN ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE POEMS OF THE SUNG DYNASTY, I PAUSE TO ADMIRE THE LENGTH AND CLARITY OF THEIR TITLES.(Poem)
Author: Billy Collins
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 1999
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: 174Issue: 3Page: 131

Article Type: Poem

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