Picnic, lightning

The easy swing of Collins' lines reflects his love of jazz and his ready response to beauty; the warmth of his voice emanates from his instinct for pleasure and his propensity toward humor. The title poem, for instance, is an improvisation on a terse description of a fatal freak accident in Nabokov's Lolita in which Collins, ever on the lookout for that old silver lining, or the happy bafflement of a koan, turns his contemplation of "the instant hand of Death / always ready to burst forth" into a subtle celebration of life. It's all in the mind, he implies, writing most ebulliently and perceptively about the realm of the imagination: an evening spent reading the F section of a single-volume encyclopedia becomes the catalyst for a hilarious sequence of thoughts, and a tour through the candy-smooth pages of a Victoria's Secret catalog evolves into a performance of great wit and sweet self-mockery. Collins is jazzman and Buddhist, charmer and prince. --Donna Seaman

The sixth book of poems by the Lehman College professor has the same carefree, if not careless, sensibility of his earlier work. His catalogues of everyday moments-a jazz riff heard, a book passage remembered, a bird contemplated-aspire to a Frank O'Hara-like chattiness. But Collins (in poems such as ""I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakely's Version of 'Three Blind Mice' "") lacks that great cosmopolitan's jaunty bop and charm. Collins's semirural musings rely on mundane imagery (night is ""black and silky""; the woods are ""dense green"") and his regular-guy, Buddhist-joker pose-which can be funny, though he's never particularly witty or ironic. These forty-odd poems that celebrate the ephemeral seem, appropriately, dashed-off and therefore forgettable. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.