Two books delivered beauty, inspiration and humor — just when I needed them most

Sometimes, I do believe there is a Book God who sends the book I need, when I need it. This week, the Book God sent a special delivery of not one, but two much needed books.

For years, Billy Collins has been both blessed and burdened with the tag line that identifies him as “one of America’s favorite poets.” I say “burdened” because if a poet is popular, the suspicion arises that they’re a mere rhymester, a step or two up from a Hallmark assembly line troubadour.

Even at this late stage in Collins’ career — he’s in his early 80s now, has served as Poet Laureate, and has published 12 earlier collections of poetry — his simplicity of language invites cynics to regard him as simplistic. Those of us who’ve long read his work know better.

Water, Water, Collins’ collection of 60 new poems, takes its title from the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and its often misquoted lines: “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.”

Coleridge is also the guy who talked about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which is an apt description of what Collins has always done in his own work. If anything has shifted in Collins’ poems over the years, it’s that the theme of aging is more prevalent; specifically the way aging makes a person estranged from their former selves and others.

Take the poem called “When a Man Loves Something.” Like most of Collins’ work, it appears to be autobiographical, narrated in what Collins himself drolly calls, the “first-person-selfish point of view.” Collins starts out remembering a night when he heard the blues singer Percy Sledge perform in a roadhouse “on the edge of a California desert.” A loopy interlude follows:

Years later, when I lived in Florida,
We had a plumber
Whose name was Lynn Hammer.
I like to introduce people to one another,
But Lynn Hammer said
he had never heard of Percy Sledge
and put his head back under the sink.
So many miscues like that these days,

Near the poem’s end, Collins imagines there’s a planet called “the Past,” and he’s on it, orbiting the sun.

Collins is his own most eloquent critic. In a poem bearing the stripped down title of, “Your Poem,” he suggests that one of the go-to emotions in his work is: “buoyant ease in the shadow of mortality”. This whole collection is filled with poems that strike that rare attitude. And, some of them, like “Emily Dickinson in Space,” are among the best poems that Collins has ever written.

Now for something completely different.

I usually hesitate to review graphic novels and illustrated books for Fresh Air because it’s hard to do justice to their visual power. But, James Norbury’s illustrated “adult fable” called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago and I’ve been under its spell ever since.

Norbury, who’s the bestselling author and illustrator of the philosophical Big Panda and Tiny Dragon books, is a practicing Buddhist. His books are not meant to comfort as much as they’re meant to accompany readers on their own hard journeys.

The Dog Who Followed the Moon opens on a winter dawn in the mountains. Norbury’s blue, white and brown watercolors on the opening pages are influenced by Zen art; they make readers feel the stillness of this imaginary world. A puppy named Amaya, who’s become separated from her parents, wanders into the snowy landscape.

Starving and lonely, Amaya mistakes a wolf pack for friendly dogs. The wolves circle her and attack. Just as Amaya is about to be torn apart, she’s rescued by an old Wolf, the former leader of the pack. Together, they set off through a fantastic landscape of ancient ruins and despair and loss, always looking for the moon to lead them, and struggling to keep the faith when it disappears behind clouds.

Norbury says in his “Afterword” that his moon was his art and that he “spent twenty-five years with very little money … depressed, anxious, defeated, addicted, …” before coming out the other side. “Inspirational” is a word that’s become cheapened, but it’s a fitting word for The Dog Who Followed the Moon — an inspirational and gorgeous book about not giving up.