Though Collins has always been one of my favorite poets, this volume felt a bit forced.  Most of his past works have led to frequent ‘Aha’ moments, head nodding, and outright laughter, but this book was a bit short on all three.  I did like his references to other poets, both known (Donald Hall, Frank Bidart) and unknown to me (Fernando Passoa, the Portuguese poet and critic of the 20^th C).  I also loved his poem, Salvitur Ambulando “It is solved by walking”  which begins “I sometimes wonder about the thoughtful Roman/who came up with the notion/that any problem can be solved by walking,” and its implication that a mathematician working out a difficult problem might end up in Patagonia by the time he solved it, and the funny poem entitled Mister Shakespeare in which he writes a fantastic line about how a dead poet has been ‘turned into a stone where his name is chiseled/above his dates separated by the hyphen of his life.”  I think the phrase, ‘hyphen of his life’ is going to stay with me a long time.   Worth reading the whole book for those two lines!