Whale Day

And Other Poems

By: Billy Collins

Narrated by: Billy Collins

A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling 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’s reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.

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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.

Master Poet

Love Billy Collins! I've listened to Whale Day three times, discovered something new each time.

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.

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!