Out of the ordinary poetry

Billy Collins brings a brilliant eye to the most mundane events, writes Alan O’Riordan

A DOMESTIC scene: you’re chopping vegetables or herbs as you prepare a meal, with your favourite music playing in the background. Most of us can say, at such times, that life is good. What most of us don’t do is elevate such moments into art.

But that’s what Billy Collins does. The American poet, twice his country’s laureate, finds the poetic in the ordinary. But Collins does not wallow in the habitual, the banal, as Patrick Kavanagh famously did; instead, he uses everyday moments as jumping-off points for ironic speculation, comic inflation, reductiones ad absurdum.