Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins; 2011. Hardcover.

The poems here cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union. With simple diction and effortless turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac, as in the opening lines of the title poem:

Every morning since you disappeared for good,

I read about you in the newspaper

along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Some days I am reminded that today

will not be a wildly romantic time for you . . .

And in this reflection on his own transience:

It doesn’t take much to remind me

what a mayfly I am,

what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur

in a museum does the trick every time

or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.