'Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," I say at Books Upstairs. "Do you have any left?" A few browsers look up, startled. Any what? I can hear them thinking, any of Emily Dickinson's clothes? As it happens, there are no copies of Billy Collins's selected poems of this wonderfully arresting title left in Dublin this rainy Monday afternoon.
It's the day after the night before, when the American poet read at the Gate as part of the closing event at the Dublin Writers' Festival. All his books sold out over the weekend, and phone calls to Dublin bookshops this morning could not yield a single copy. Hence I am en route to the interview with a copy borrowed from the DWF artistic director, Pat Boran. This particular book is a gift for his mate John F. Deane. It has already been signed by Collins, and if I drop it in a puddle between here and the hotel, I am in Big Trouble.
There are not many poets who enjoy the frustration of knowing their book has sold out while punters are willing to buy yet more copies. Billy Collins, whose selected poems were published for the first time on this side of the Atlantic by Picador last year, is in this happy position. When he came into the Gate foyer on Sunday to sign books after his reading, there were no books left to sign. His reputation had preceded him among the standing army of writers and readers in this country, although his name will still be unfamiliar to many.
Collins is now hitting his seventh decade and is enjoying considerable success. Some would say poetry came late to him - his first collection, The Apple That Astonished Paris, did not appear until he was in his late 40s. Perhaps this later-than-usual start for a writer stuck a particular chord with the fiction writer Annie Proulx, who herself published late and spectacularly, and whose warm praise is on the covers of his books. In Ireland, we have become over-used to a culture of poetry where our writers publish early and often, whereas the best work often emerges only much later.
Collins drinks from a pint of Guinness in the dimly-lit, deserted restaurant of a Dublin hotel, where a red couch stretches the entire length of the room. He is thoughtful, measured, and sharp in his answers, which are delivered with the kind of gracious confidence that comes from the security of success. When he smiles a certain way, he looks uncannily like John McGahern, who read earlier on in the festival. Do the participants in a literary event start shape-changing at some point?
Amazon, the online bookshop, regularly lists Collins as one of its best-selling poets. Is he surprised it took some 11 years to be published on this side of the Atlantic? He thinks about this for a while. No, he's not. "There is a mutual blindness on both sides of the Atlantic about other poets," he suggests.
"For instance, Americans don't pay much attention to English language poetry that's not American. They're much more interested in Czech, or Latin American, or Russian poets."
He's pleased that the title of his European book is catching attention. "I know I have a low-level name recognition here, so I hoped an arresting title would have some sort of punch."
Like many, Collins wrote poetry as a college student. "They were impenetrable, cloaked, hooded, dense things. There was never any humour. I assumed it had to be humourless if it was to be any good. It was a long time before I stopped trying to commit 'acts of literature' and started writing poems."
Prior to his first collection in 1988, he published two chapbooks, of which he is now not proud. "They were jokey things. Like blowing out birthday candles. One puff and they were gone." For some years, he worked away at poems until he had about 50. These he sent them to an acquaintance for feedback. Then as now, he does not show his poems until a book is finished, other than to his wife, Diane.
The poems he sent off came back with a paperclip around some of the pages - 17 poems - with the message that the reader had considered these ones good, and the other ones not so good. "That was the most important paperclip of my life," Collins says. "I could see what made them different."
He has since written beautifully on the process of writing - possibly the hardest subject matter for any writer, since it comes with the assumption that you yourself now know how to write. 'Advice to Writers' is a lovely poem that records the procrastination involved before settling down to pin words to paper: "The more you clean, the more brilliant/your writing will be".
So what was it that he saw in those 17 poems which had been returned to him? "The irony was adjusted properly," he reflects. "The poems weren't falling down on either side of sentimentality or cynicism. That to me would be a perfect poem - the one I'm always going to be trying to write, where a reader doesn't know whether the poem is being serious or playful."
Collins's best-known poems do commute from seriousness to playfulness in just this way. The barking dog of the neighbours in 'Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House' becomes the barking dog in an orchestra, then the Beethoven solo of the same name, and all the while the title hovers like a holster over the poem. Collins definitely has titles that even Paul Durcan would admire: 'I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice', is only one of several.
Based in New York, where he teaches at CUNY, for most of the year, Collins knows Ireland well enough now from several visits to not be "doing the tourist thing" any more, and he has a number of writer friends here. He did a stint as writer in residence at the Burren College of Art, which produced the poem 'Afternoon With Irish Cows', and an enduring love of the strange landscape of north Clare.
He says he has no work habits and simply writes one poem after another. "I always try to crash through to the ending and then go back and work on the whole piece." He describes his process of working as being akin to "making cuts on a disorganised record" - and music is a recurring image in his work. "I just try to make one good line after another. Make solid lines to build on." And I'm left wondering what kind of startling shapes these poems would make if they were indeed actual objects.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes: Selected Poems by Billy Collins is published by Picador at £6.99 in the UK