Questions about Angels Book

The cover and the title of this collection are both misleading. Very misleading. The collection is divided into four parts. Of the four parts, only one (the second part) reflects what the cover and title would suggest - that is, a poetry collection dealing with religious themes. And even in the second part, these religious themes are minimal. Poems with titles like "Questions About Angels", "A Wonder of the World", "The Afterlife", and "The Dead" are likewise misleading.

"Questions About Angels" is a poem that pokes fun at the question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, elaborating on the question and asking why we don't ask other questions about angels...

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
(pg. 25)

(Granted, the religious themes are evident in this passage, but this is about as religious as it gets - which is not a fair representation of the overall text.)

"A Wonder of the World" is a poem that is all set-up and no pay-off. Collins builds the reader's anticipation, describing without revealing the so-called "Wonder of the World"...

It looks different than it does in photographs
and it is nothing like what you had imagined,
but there it is, motionless, unavoidable, real.
(pg. 27)

"The Afterlife" does not commit to any one interpretation of the afterlife, but rather suggests that every person is sent to a personal afterlife "according to (their) own private beliefs"...

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
(pg. 33)

Collins breaks from poems of Angels and Death and the Afterlife by ending the second part with "Going Out for Cigarettes", a poem that explores a familiar scenario...

one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,
not one phone call, not even a postcard from Rio.

The fourth part follows a similar continuity, with poems that sometimes lapse into parody - poems such as "Metamorphosis", "Wolf", and "Rip Van Winkle".

"Metamorphosis", perhaps my favourite of the poems from the fourth part (in part because I admire Kafka), asks or the synonymous author...

If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence
perhaps he could transform me into something new,
a slow willful river running through a forest,
or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters
hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary.
(pg. 70)

"Wolf" is a play on the wolves of fairy tales, in which the poet describes a wolf, not the anthropomorphic wolf of cartoons but a real wold on all fours, reading a book of fairy tales. Not surprisingly, the poems ends...

Later that night, lost in a town of pigs,
he knocks over houses with his breath.
(pg. 76)

"Rip Van Winkle" is a simple rumination on the familiar story. Collins contemplates the real-life implications of Rip Van Winkle's decades-long slumber, and muses somewhat aimlessly...

Here reclines the patron saint of sleep.
He has sawed enough logs to heat the Land of Nod.
His dreams are longer than all of homer.
And the Z above his head looks anchored in the air.

These aren't bad poems, but overall the second and fourth part of the collections contained my least favourite poems. The first and third part, however, compensate for any shortcoming in the second and fourth. Herein the poet had accumulated some of his best poems, including "The Death of Allegory", "The Norton Anthology of English Literature", "Purity", "Come Running", "Weighing the Dog", and "Vade Mecum" - here is the poet at his best: his humour is most potent, his wit is most striking, and his structure is more refined.

"The Death of Allegory" is a poem that literalizes the allegorical figures of Renaissance paintings and asks what became of them...

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.
(pg. 13)

"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" is a satirical response to the standards by which a poets is categorized within an era (be it Victorian, Elizabethan, medieval, etc...), deconstructing the apparent relevance of the poet's birth and death, and then departing completely...

Did you know that it is possible if you read a poem
enough times, if you read it over and over without stopping,
that you can make the author begin to spin gently,
even affectionately, in his grave?
(pg. 17)

"Purity" is a demonstration of the poet's humour, in which he claims to remove his skin and organs as part of his writing ritual (the humour is in his suggestion that sometimes he neglects to remove his penis)...

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.
(pg. 42)

"Come Running" appeals to me personally for its use of abstraction. It is an abstraction the reader will recognize from other poems, in which an idea becomes an object - in this case, the poet's name becomes an object that is stolen by the neighbor's dog...

Perhaps the dog was never given a name
and is not eating mine with pleasure
under a porch in the cool, lattice-shadowed dirt.

Perhaps late tonight I will hear the voice
of my neighbor as she stands at her back door,
hands cupped around her mouth, calling my name,
and I will leap the hedge and come running.
(pg. 52)

"Weighing the Dog" is a narrative reminiscent of Raymond Carver, a narrative that begins with an occurrence that is simultaneously uncommon and commonplace (so uncommon that it is believably commonplace). Ultimately, this occurrence tells us something about the character's life, and the circumstances surrounding this small otherwise trivial occurrence...

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.
(pg. 56)

"Vade Mecum" is a short poem (the shortest in the collection) but one that is disarming in its simplicity and sentimentality...

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
(pg. 61)

Who doesn't want to be carried in this book? Reading this poem I feel sentimental for a person I haven't met, sentimental for a book I haven't seen.