
Whale Day
And Other Poems
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Narrated by:
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Billy Collins
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By:
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Billy Collins
About this listen
A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and New York Times best-selling author of The Rain in Portugal
“The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday.” (The Wall Street Journal)
Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins’ reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.
©2020 Billy Collins (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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By: Billy Collins, and others
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Good Poems
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Thank you for being slow & speaking of beauty.
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Wonderful Listening Experience
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Upstream
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, who inspired her to vanish into the world of her own writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love.
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Beautiful essays
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Academic Snobbery
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Story
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
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solomn
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By: Ocean Vuong
What listeners say about Whale Day
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Thomas Kirk
- 01-30-23
More
The plates and cups were full. We ate and drank till we could not possibly take another bite or down another gulp. And yet, we cried for more.
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- Susan H.
- 08-29-21
Master Poet
Love Billy Collins! I've listened to Whale Day three times, discovered something new each time.
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- Maggie Hess
- 11-03-20
To be read in the voice of Billy Collins
I have considered Billy Collins among the best writers ever since I first came across his poetry, which happened to be a poem he read on Prairie Home Companion about a Lanyard. I myself have long considered myself a poet, and I often wondered, regarding Collins, how he got to the superior collected quality you find in Whale Day and the rest of his works. "It is something about his voice," I considered quietly to myself, not realizing the irony in my words until later. Now I think I have found just what it is about his writing that carries so strongly in voice, because I imagine one day, long ago, when Billy Collins looked down at his own shoes and said to himself "If I want to be a poet, I am going to have to transform my literal voice into something that better fits what I do wish to have as my poetry." So on that day, age 13, when his voice finally had begun changing to something screechy and juvenile naturally on his own, Collins began the artful embodiment of the style of speech that you hear in this wonderful book today, or maybe you haven't read this yet, in which case let me describe it. The narrating voice of Billy Collins puts true poetry, deep emotional moments of love and trembling, to a vocalization that I personally have described as monotone. But it is in the contrast from his totally relatable writing to this droll yet sensitive tone, that so exquisitely and beautifully captures all that I value in poetry.
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1 person found this helpful
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- William
- 01-21-24
Billy Collins’ Sense of Humor
Billy Collins annoys me because I wish I could write poems as good as his but I can’t. Rats!
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